[ELDK] OpenJDK and Other Questions

[James Black]

Dear Gentlemen,

IMHO, embedded powerpc linux development would not be where it is
today without Mr. Denk's cohesive efforts and willingness to support
u-boot and open source tools.

The ELDK is the place where many, who cannot afford the large fees
from Montavista and others, start their development experience. Many
commercial products are created with the tools provided in the ELDK.
I've had my eye on the development of u-boot and the toolset since my
first encounter in 2004. In the last year, the effort being exerted by
Freescale, AMCC and MonteVista is testament to how important these
tools are for these chip vendors to their marketing strategy. Prior to
that, all that was available was expensive proprietary toolsets and
bootloaders for powerpc-realtime applications.

I feel that u-boot and embedded linux is just starting to come into
its own. The unembedded linux community is starting to recognize that
the embedded community is growing and needs encouragement to grasp the
nature of open source development. Check www.lwn.net for rumblings on
this topic.  A realtime embedd linux conference with some heavy
hitters attending and speaking. http://www.mvista.com/vision/

In the last 4 years things have begun to change in the USA. I know by
experience that the community inside and outside the USA is quite
large, albeit anonymous. The company I work for now uses embedded
linux as an employment incentive to attract developers. The whole
embedded linux thing provides a rapid development cycle using
developers not necessarily cognizant about realtime applications and
resource limited hardware. Liek Jon Corbet says" It just works"

Good Luck,

Jim Black


On Sun, Sep 14, 2008 at 2:52 PM, Wolfgang Denk <wd at denx.de> wrote:
> Dear Jason,
>
> In message <8f9e78f00809120734s683ed4e0if88fec4779d00209 at mail.gmail.com> you wrote:
>>
>> 1.) OpenJDK - I'd like to get OpenJDK running on my target platforms.
>> Is anybody currently working on such an effort or interested in doing
>> so? General comments on suitability of these platforms for running
>> OpenJDK?
>
> We have not much experience with  using  Java  in  embedded  systems.
> Maybe  others  are  in  a  better  position  to  anser this question.
> [However, ELDk 4.2 includes gcj, so you can do some Java  development
> within  the  ELDK context. Don't know if this is good enough for your
> purposes.]
>
>> 2.) Community Size - I'm hoping someone can provide some information
>> about the number of users/companies actively using ELDK (and perhaps
>
> I guess it's impossible to tell the number of  actual  ELDK  users  -
> many,  many  of  them  just  download  the code without ever becoming
> visible on mailing lists or similar. You can get a little  indication
> for  example  by  looking at the statistics collected by the Embedded
> Linux polls performed by linuxdevices.com, but  again  this  reflects
> only a small fraction of the market.
>
>> more generally AMCC processors). I was looking at the ELDK mailing
>> list archives and was a little surprised there weren't more postings.
>
> There may be two explantions for this: (1) this list is  not  so  old
> (it  was  started  only 10 months ago) and we do not make much rumour
> about it; (2) quite a lot of  people  prefer  not  to  use  a  public
> mailing  list  but  rather  contact  un  directly - for example, most
> requests regarding AMCC processors go through our commercial  support
> channel.
>
>> Don't get me wrong - I think you guys have a very nice offering.  It's
>> important to me because I'd like to be confident the platform choices
>> I'm making have a viable and sustainable community of users,
>> developers, etc.
>
> You might dig a bit in the PPC and U-Boot mailing list  archives  and
> you  probably  would  get  a little impression of how many people use
> ELDK, and what they think about it.
>
>> 3.) Documentation - Good set of online docs. Section 8 seems to be
>> missing content, however. Any pointers to other good reading
>
> Yes, there are many things missing, or have not completely be changed
> to arech/powerpc specifics yet. On the other hand, the  documentation
> is  a wiki, so everybody is welcome to contribute. Unfortunately only
> few actually do that.
>
>> materials/resources you guys would recommend (specific to Building and
>> Using Modules)?
>
> There is nothing special in ELDK about using modules. You  have  some
> Linux  kernel  directory somewhere where you configure and build your
> Linux kernel (this is a prerequisite for building modules); then  you
> "cd" into the directory which holds your module source code and type
> "make ARCH=powerpc -C <your_linux_tree> M=`pwd` modules". That's it.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Wolfgang Denk
>
> --
> DENX Software Engineering GmbH,     MD: Wolfgang Denk & Detlev Zundel
> HRB 165235 Munich, Office: Kirchenstr.5, D-82194 Groebenzell, Germany
> Phone: (+49)-8142-66989-10 Fax: (+49)-8142-66989-80 Email: wd at denx.de
> The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. "Where shall I begin,  please
> your Majesty ?" he asked.
> "Begin at the beginning,", the King said, very gravely,  "and  go  on
> till you come to the end: then stop."                -- Lewis Carroll
> _______________________________________________
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> eldk at lists.denx.de
> http://lists.denx.de/mailman/listinfo/eldk
>



-- 
Jim Black
Senior Software Engineer
Aztek Networks, Inc.
2477 55th Street, Suite 202
Boulder, CO 80301
www.azteknetworks.com