eCosCentric Limited, the eCos experts, today announced the latest iteration of the eCosPro real-time operating system. The new 4.1 release of the eCosPro Developer’s Kit includes the latest Eclipse Neon IDE, delivers improvements to the eCosPro Eclipse plug-in and development tools, and integrates a variety of run-time enhancements.

In addition to the major upgrade to Eclipse Neon.3, enhancements have been made to the eCosPro Eclipse plug-in that improve the eCos developer experience. Changes include allowing multiple eCos Application and Configuration projects per workspace, and a straightforward way to associate eCos Application projects with different eCos Configuration Projects. A new hardware debug launcher has been added that simplifies the setup and use of hardware debuggers with eCos. The launcher also integrates the display of debug messages from a variety of sources (GDB, ITM, network socket or serial port) into the Eclipse console. Profiling enhancements to eCosCentric’s plugin provides push-button extraction and display of profiling data from the target.

The eCosPro 4.1 eCos Configuration tool sees further refinements that aid developer productivity. Locally installed copies of the eCosPro documentation are now fully searchable and easily accessible, via the Help system integrated within Eclipse. The navigation and editing of configuration data has been enhanced, and a new filter function that simplifies how packages and targets are presented has been added.

eCosPro’s Symmetric Multi Processing (SMP) support has been extended to the quad-core Cortex-A53 and Cortex-A7 based Broadcom SOC’s, as used in the latest iterations of the Raspberry Pi single board computers. Future releases within the v4.1 series of eCosPro will incorporate evaluation copies of Raspberry Pi support, providing a common target platform for engineers to try out extended features and test their own code.

eCosPro v4.1 incorporates a number of runtime enhancements:

  • Cortex-A53 and Cortex-A7 Symmetric Multi Processing (SMP) support
  • Raspberry Pi target platform support included as standard in upcoming v4.1 releases
  • Support for ST’s low-power STM32L series and its enhanced on-chip peripheral feature-set
  • The compact lwIP network stack updated with the latest upstream lwIP 2.0.1 enhancements
  • The feature-rich BSD-derived TCP/IP stack now validated for high performance parts within ST’s STM32F series
  • CAN and Gigabit Ethernet drivers for Atmel SAMA5-based target platforms