eCosProFlyer.pdf — page 2

eCos RTOS Overview 
 
Designed from the ground up to meet the needs of deeply embedded applications, eCos places an emphasis on 
minimizing the resource footprint and ensuring real-time responsiveness. The RTOS is configurable at the source 
code level via a highly intuitive graphical configuration tool, and can easily be tailored to the precise needs of 
your application, avoiding the bloat of a traditional operating system. 
 
eCos has been engineered to work in situations where many operating systems simply will not fit. It 
accommodates scaling down to a few tens of kilobytes for deployment in low-cost and SoC based designs with 
stringent hardware resource constraints and minimal functionality requirements. Equally, it can be easily scaled 
up, for example, to include full TCP/IP networking, USB and file system functionality. eCos is fully pre-emptible, 
delivering real-time behaviour with minimal interrupt latencies and a rich set of synchronization primitives for full 
multi-threading support. SMP is available for multi-core processors and includes CPU thread affinity locking and 
spinlocks for fast synchronization. The configurability of eCos extends down to the most fundamental levels, 
providing, for example, a choice of scheduling policies; interrupt handling mechanisms and alternative semantics 
for dealing with priority inversions. 
 
eCos provides all the drivers, libraries, and services you would expect from an embedded operating system, 
alongside compatibility layers to comply with industry standards and assist with application code migration. 
 
Target Hardware 
Embedded Application 
 
RedBoot 
Bootstrap and Debug 
Firmware 
 
Device Drivers 
Ethernet 
Serial 
Flash 
SPI 
... 
I2C 
USB 
IDE 
... 
uITRON 
POSIX 
Compatibility Layers 
 
LWIP 
... 
BSD TCP/IP 
Networking Stacks 
... 
Math 
ISO C 
libstdc++ 
Libraries 
 
Filesystems 
ROM  
JFFS2 
Journaling 
Flash FS 
 
MS-DOS 
FAT 
... 
 
Hardware Abstraction layer (HAL) 
 
 
Platform HAL 
Variant HAL 
Architectural HAL 
Real-Time Kernel 
 
 
An elegant and highly portable hardware abstraction layer (HAL) allows for rapid porting of eCos to prototype 
hardware and deployment in real products. BootUp, RedBoot and eCos share the same HAL infrastructure, 
making it possible to bring up both bootstrap, debug firmware and operating system on a new board in one 
painless exercise. eCos supports all the main processor families as well as many less well known architectures 
and numerous models within each family. 
 
 ARM 7/9/11 
 Cortex A5/A7/A9/A53 
 Cortex M3/M4/M7 
 ColdFire 
 Intel x86 
 microMIPS 
 MIPS 
 NIOS II 
 PowerPC 
 SPARC 
 SuperH 
 TileGX 
 
eCosPro is currently available for over one hundred development and evaluation boards, as well as commercial 
modules. These scale from efficient Cortex-M based boards, through FPGA based dual-core Cortex-A9 systems, 
to massively parallel TileGX designs. Of particular note is the support for the Raspberry Pi range of boards, 
which can provide an excellent low-cost base for evaluation, prototyping, deployment and educational purposes. 
 
eCos’s open source nature confers many benefits. On the commercial side, the absence of any royalty or 
product licensing fees make it particularly cost effective, especially in high volume designs. On the engineering 
side, eCos puts the developer in control. The availability of all the source code provides the ultimate in flexibility, 
aiding the debugging of complex application code, and enabling the customization and enhancement of the 
system’s functionality as required. 
 
 
 
Tel +44 1223 245571                 www.ecoscentric.com 
Fax +44 1223 248712                info@ecoscentric.com 
 
Copyright © 2017 eCosCentric Limited. All rights reserved. eCosCentric, eCosPro and eCos are registered trademarks of eCosCentric Limited in the USA and United 
Kingdom. RedBoot is a trademark of Red Hat Inc. in the USA. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft 
Corporation in the USA and other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. V16 March 2017.