[En-Nut-Discussion] Supporting Other Target Platforms

[Erik Lins]

Dear Nic,

> Watch out, this will start a processor war :-)

uuh, I don't hope so! Everybody has it's favorate processor 
architecture and the reasons range from real technical issues over "we 
never used anything else" and end up to religious and fanatic reasons. 

I don't want to convince andbody to use ColdFire instead of ARM or 
whatever.

> I know the motorola cpus have some great features but:
> 1-AVR's are quite close to ARM cores 

That's correct and it might be an advantage during porting Nut/OS to 
the new architecture, but the advantage gets smaller when you program 
mostly in C/C++ and diminishes further when porting is done and you 
write native applications for the new CPU.

> 2-You will get a lot more out of an ARM port because of the number of
> processors available from different vendors.

Well, that's a more "global" point of view, it might be true, that - 
well - "mankind" gets more out of an ARM port, but I have a certain 
demand for a ColdFire port, so in the near future _I_ will get more out 
of a ColdFire port. And since Harald takes care of an ARM port, both me 
and mankind should be satisfied in the end. ;-) 

The raw number of core implementations is not necessarily an indication 
for the quality of that core (I guess 8051 is on of the most often 
implemented cores and also one of the worst architectures humans ever 
invented, and also Intels x86 architecture is clearly deeply sub-
optimal), but more an indication for the quality of some companies 
marketing division.

> 3-You can easily upgrade to better cores eg: ARM9

Motorola (and to some extend IBM) offers ColdFire cores in various 
performance ranges (V2 core currently up to 125MHz, V4 core up to 
316MHz) and the PowerPC based controllers (PowerQUICC network 
processors and MPCxxx microcontrollers) are some kind of elemental 
upgrade path ranging up to several hundred MHz.

As my english teacher often mentioned: "Variety is the salt of life", 
so I think we should try to make Nut/OS available on several CPU 
architectures and I'm convinced that all ports will benefit from the 
work and experiences collected in certain ports, expecially non-
mainstream ports in the end.

Cheers,
ER!K

---
LINS Technologies
http://www.lins.de