OS Comparison Questions!

Hey there,

I'm part of a student group starting a project which will use the Nios II on a FPGA PCB of our own design. Essentially, we will require an operating system to schedule the different sw interfaces with the hw devices (sound, vga, etc).

We have no experience with the different operating systems available for the Nios, and so we come to this forum for advice.

We're considering three operating systems at this point: MicroC/OS-II, the Microtronix uClinux distro, and eCos.

Here are our concerns:

1) We want to choose something easy to use. We have experience with linux/unix development, but no experience developing for the Nios. We have a license for the Nios II IDE, and I know that MicroC/OS-II and uClinux can be used for it, what would we use instead for eCos? I'm assuming the command-line, but how hard is it to figure out?

2) We will need some fashion of simple graphics library, with no specification defined yet. I believe we can do this either in the fpga or in software, but if we choose the software route, we want to be able to write it to interface with the OS or use one that's already developed for the OS. So the question is, how easy is it to develop device drivers in these OSes?

3) Since we're not making a commercial product, we're only kinda concerned with the licensing issue. However, since we're students and we're using this project at least partly to expand our resumes, we'd like to choose an operating system we'll be using again in industry. Bottom line, we want to use something free for us and have the skill be useful in the future.

4) Our board probably won't have very much memory, so low memory usage is a concern. Numbers?

5) Specifically for uClinux, is it hard to get RTLinux working with it?

6) Again specifically for uClinux, what's the difference between the Microtronix version and this: http://www.enseirb.fr/~kadionik/embedded/u...os-uclinux.html (http://www.enseirb.fr/~kadionik/embedded/uclinux/nios-uclinux.html)

If anyone could answer all these questions, maybe making a webpage devoted to operating system comparison would be useful for the community http://forum.niosforum.com/work2/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif

Thanks everyone.

--Dan Healy

danhealy@ucsc.edu