Hi,

I see on the Genesi web site that QNX has been ported or is in the progress of being ported to the EFIKA 5K2 board. What is the progress of this? Is there a BSP available?

Thanks,

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-Olav

Hi haugan, you would need to see QNX about that.

R&B

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http://bbrv.blogspot.com

Haugan,
did you ever get feedback on which BSP to use? It may be that the "Freescale Lite5200B and Media5200 BSP" will work...

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Kevin Nickels, Assoc. Prof, Trinity University, San Antonio, TX, USA

The correct BSP is the Efika one. QNX will know what you mean if you ask for it and reference Genesi, CC Bill or me or whatever.

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Matt Sealey

Kevin, check your inbox!

R&B :)

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http://bbrv.blogspot.com

Just to update the rest of you, I got (beta) patches from bplan to the mgt-5200b BSP to make it work on the efika. So for now you need the Motorola Lite5200/Media5200 BSP from QNX. Don't know what will happen when the support gets out of beta. You can read all about it on my project blog.

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Kevin Nickels, Assoc. Prof, Trinity University, San Antonio, TX, USA

What's the installation process like?

Well, QNX support for the EFIKA is a beta product so I have to watch what I say :) - but I'll make some general comments on installing QNX on a target system.

I'm new to QNX, having only installed it on self-hosted x86 systems before this. IMO, most of the QNX documentation is targeted at this situation. The descriptions of how to install QNX on target systems is very detailed, but is really targeted at engineers porting to a new system. So it's confusing to a newcomer (I'm coming from a low-level embedded background - assembly on 6811s, bare C on i960s, stuff like that) who hasn't built OSs before.

The big realization is that to be scalable, QNX has designed things so that target systems are VERY different from host systems - and a self-hosted system is more like a host system than a target system. Targets don't necessarily have anything, including filesystem drivers, photon (windowing system), etc already built in. So you have to choose exactly what you want in the build. A good thing, IMO, as you can't afford a bunch of drivers floating around memory that you aren't using, but it does make it difficult for a novice such as me to figure out what I want in the build.

It would be nice to have some collection choices, kind of like other OS installs, built into Momentics (the IDE used on the host system to build the target) - so that you could choose sets of packages rather than the individual binaries and shared libraries.

I should point out that the microkernel architecture does mean that you can boot a VERY minimal system and start up drivers on the command line, playing with arguments and such, till you are happy with them, then put them in the automatic startup. The ability to start and stop services is IMO even better than linux and vxworks, which sometimes don't clean everything up all the way.

I think that if you're familiar with using QNX on target systems, once this port is finished, this will be just the same. That is, most of the issues that I've had with installation are probably either beta issues or due to my inexperience with QNX.

In contrast, the linux that I had on the EFIKA (I had debian for a week or so) is definitely what I'm calling a self-hosted system. It's a full-fledged OS, that you have to go through and turn off the drivers that you don't want. So you're paring down rather than building up as in QNX.

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Kevin Nickels, Assoc. Prof, Trinity University, San Antonio, TX, USA

Thanks for such a helpful answer - that's good to know.

Ok, so I've my Efika running. I've also downloaded and installed QNX 6.3.2 (with Academic License).

Just for a test, I've build an OS image using bsp-freescale-mgt5200b. Now, I have read here about a different BSP which is required for Efika. How can I get it?

@bvr

Check your email later today. We will send it to you.

R&B :)

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http://bbrv.blogspot.com