Porting from NET+OS 6.3 (Greenhills) to 7.3 (ESP and GNU)

Embedded Devices NET+OS
1

Hello,

we need to port an existing application from NET+OS 6.3 (Greenhills) to the latest version shipped with the ESP i.e. Net+OS 7.3. and GNU gcc. I noted the compatibility hints between NET+OS 6.x and 7.x but it appears that the hardest part is to get through all the compiler specifics which are different between Greenhills and gcc. Is there such thing as a migration guide or has anyone done such job?
TIA Roland

2

You should check out the Programmers Guide, it has a section dedicated to porting from 6.x to 7.x. The makefiles in the ESP are automatically generated for you and you can’t update them, so that, in a way, makes it even easier. Other than that most of the code should be able to be ported.

3

I have the same problem.

We are working with the Netsilicon Net+50 processor and had started with NetOS version 3. Cause there was no bootloader existing, we programmed our own.
The SNMP stack was not usable, so we used our own. The webserver was full of bugs, so we used our own. So far to our history.

Actually we are using NetOS 6.0 (with Greenhills) and only the TCP/IP stack.

Now we have to port to NetOS 7.3 (with GNU and ESP) because the Net+50 is no more available and we will change to the NS9215.

My problem is that the new ESP is from my point of view very marginally documented. The tutorials on the “Welcome” screen only touch the surface.

How can i write my own bootloader with the ESP (i need that because we use a mirrored flash image for security) ?
How can i get influence to the automatically generated makefile generation ? Seems to be deeply frozen in the Digi ESP plugins ?

Thanks in advance

4

If you are willing to step out of ESP and use the command line tools you can side step both of these issues. There are a complete set standard make files under the netOs7.3/4/5 directory trees that can be modified as you see fit. When you do this, you can use the included gdbtk to debug the boot loader. The caveats are:

  1. gdbtk stepping in optimized (O2 and such) code dose not always do what you expect.
  2. you may need to do assembly single steps when running out of flash.
5

Hello. I’m considering upgrading our product’s NET+OS from v6.3 (Greenhills) to v7.3 (or higher, because I need SSH support - and this is one of the ways of getting it).

I know this post is pretty old but I’m curious to know how did you guys handled the issue eventually - how hard/long was the porting process? Looking back at it, do you have some tips for me?

Maybe it will be easier just to implement SSH by myself? Or integrate some prepared package?

Any help will be appreciated.
Thanks,
Amir.