eCos for Not Yet Techies

"Computer Careers: Working With the Open Source Operating Systems for Embedded Computers"

by Richard Stooker, President Info Ring Press and author of Secrets of Changing to a Computer Career

eCos is an open source operating system for embedded systems. Many of today's computers are NOT sitting on desktops or in company server rooms. Many of them are small and in places where we don't see or think about them, such as the engine of our cars, in our household appliances and in our cell phones. eCos stands for Embedded Configurable Operating System.

When you tell your toaster at night, "have three slices of light brown toast ready for me at 7:10 AM tomorrow morning," you'll be programming a small computer that could use Sun Microsystems' Java J2ME (this is actually what that language was originally designed to do), Microsoft's Windows CE -- or the free eCos.

eCos began in 1997 when Cygnus Solutions did a research project to find out why so many companies did the programming for RTOS / Real Time Operating Systems (that is, systems for appliances such as your toaster or microwave oven) on in-house basis, despite the high cost of such projects.

Cygnus Solutions studied the market to learn what companies wanted from a standard embedded systems operating system and by 1998 were ready to release their proposed solutions -- eCos.

Because these computers are so small and so limited in function, their operating systems must leave out all unnecessary code. eCos is only about 200 bytes, versus the 100s of kilobytes of others.

The core components of eCos are:

HAL -- Handsome Abstraction Layer
Kernel
ISO C++ math libraries
Device drivers
GNU debugger (GDB) support

eCos also supports a wide variety of commercial embedded architectures.

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