Operating Systems for SH Processors

Nucleus

Nucleus PLUS is a small and high-portable real-time OS produced by Accelerated Technology Incorporated. It is used in many embedded products without much fuss or fanfare and in our experience just gets on and does the job. As your application code statically links to Nucleus, and as it doesn't use an MMU there's no virtual memory, development with Nucleus requires little in the way of extras from CODESCAPE. You can use CODESCAPE scripting to automatically initialize the SH hardware after a reset, load the executable combining Nucleus and your application directly into memory and then debug or run to your heart's content. Nucleus PLUS OS-aware debugging is provided by scripts enabling task properties and system call history to be displayed by CODESCAPE. For downloadable Script examples check out our Scripting examples

Linux

Over recent years Linux has been undergone a transformation from a desktop-only OS too large for embedded applications to being a perfectly viable choice for many modern products. As we have considerable in-house experience of Linux both on the desktop and in embedded products we're ideally placed to be able to offer Linux development and debug solutions for embedded applications that use SH processors. Our approach is to make things as simple as possible for people to get started.

CODESCAPE also streamlines earlier stages of embedded Linux development by using the Dash to remotely initialise the target hardware (ROMless boot), rapidly downloading the kernel at up to 1Mbyte/s, and then enabling source-level debugging of the kernel itself.

Using CODESCAPE you can have a Linux kernel running on pretty much any SH hardware without having to struggle with boot ROMs, strange serial debug tools, and without having to have a perfect kernel that fully understands every scrap of hardware. You can do all required hardware initialisation from a script within CODESCAPE (and run this automatically after every hard reset if you like) and once you have your SDRAM running can download a Linux kernel and RAM disk directly into memory. After this you can trace and debug every aspect of the Linux boot process! Breakpoint and trace drivers, examine what Linux is doing with serial ports, anything is possible.

When Linux has booted, CODESCAPE can switch from being a chip-level kernel debugger to being a thread-aware debugger than can trace and breakpoint a user-mode program running in demand paged memory. See what system calls are being made, monitor signals, or just step through your code, all from within the advanced CODESCAPE environment and all remotely via our high-speed ethernet and JTAG link. To further accelerate development you can use CODESCAPE Project Manager or Make Manager to build your Linux application and then send the updated executable to the target and re-run it all without rebooting Linux.

CODESCAPE-Linux Debugging features

CODESCAPE Professional supports the following when debugging Linux:

• Independent debugging on individual process threads.
• Linux console output display in a VT100-compatible CODESCAPE terminal region.
• Trapping and monitoring of Linux signals.