[fpc-devel] Realtime systems using FPC

[Michael Schnell]

On 07/03/2013 10:11 AM, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
>
> Do you have any URLs etc. for the BBB in this context? 
This has close to nothing to do with the BeagleBone board: it's just a 
processor feature. The BeagleBone board in fact supports it as several 
pins of the chips that can internally be connected to the peripherals 
that are in "vicinity" of the M3s "PRUS" (="Programmable Real-Time Unit 
Subsystem"). In fact all peripherals are accessible by all CPUs and DMA 
controllers, but there might be performance degradation when traversing 
bus bridges.

To learn more, you might want to read the "AM335x Applications Processor 
Technical Reference Manual" by TI (4788 pages).


> Could the realtime stuff realistically be coded in FPC, or would this 
> effectively mandate a distinct target?
I don't know if fpc can generate ARM M3 code. This might be possible. 
You need to ask the compiler experts on that.

I also don't know (yet) what development support is provided by TI for 
the PRUS. Of course a gcc is available. I do hope that there is support 
for GDB either vie JTAG or somehow via the main processor. In fact the 
PRUS does include Ethernet hardware, so I suppose TI should provide a 
TCP/IP stack for this purpose. Hopefully they have an Eclipse based IDE 
to do PRUS development.

I suppose in most cases you will need to do just very small programs to 
run on the PRUS and provide the very hard realtime stuff. Thus extremely 
comfortable development tools are not that critical.

-Michael