ecos kernel suddenly stops booting

It's possible I have identified the cause of this problem. I had a driver for the Altera SOPC PIO module. In testing I removed this driver from the configtool and I was able to build and run without locking up. I did enough building/testing to be confident this driver was the cause.

Since multiple threads could access the PIO I had added a mutex to prevent simultaneous accesses. I did some testing and it appears that the cyg_mutex_init call is the offending line within the driver. I noticed that this function makes a call to New. I've changed the source a bunch of times and haven't had a problem since removing the mutex.

I wasn't aware there was a restriction on calls within a driver's initialization.

Does anybody have any thoughts?

Stefan