components and bundles in WorkBench 2.6

[Sydney Faria]

Just starting out using vxworks and went through many tutorials using
simulator. I made a boot loader and a vxworks image using mv5500 BSP then
created a simple RTP but am having trouble figuring out exactly what bundles
and components to add into the configuration. The stand alone kernel and
real time bundles are fairly obvious to add in but there are so many
components to add it is rather confusing and I have not found any
documentation on how to go about selecting the appropriate components except
by trial and error. At this point in time I can see the RTP.vxe image in
the file system on the target MVME5500 board but cannot get it to execute.
Most of the examples such as the ball example do not really make the
selection of components very clear. Any comments and suggestions would be
greatly appreciated.
Sydney

[xam...@yahoo.com]

This is sometimes a tricky issue. The issue is "for a given BSP, what
components do you include in the Kernel Configuration" ... a good
place to start may be the BSP documentation. Knowing what hardware
features your board has and the support provided in your BSP may go a
long way.

For instance you may see references to various kinds of drives and
file systems which you know your board does NOT support ... such
things would not be included.

[sydney]

I made a bootloader and a downloadable kernel project to produce a
vxworks image using the build spec mv5500 and PPC604diab and the
'standalone kernel shell' and 'real time process development'
bundles. In class we included Network Components -> Network Utility
Components -> Ifconfig components & Show Routine components but did
not really figure out why? Please explain if possible.

I also would ask for explanation of the 'development tools components -
> WDB agent components -> WCB agent services -> WDB target server file
system. I believe that this is necessary to do debugging but am not
sure.

The code is simply an almost useless main() with no I/O since I only
need to prove that I can actually install a vxworks image on the
mvme5500 board and connect to it since I can do all this using the
simulator. I can see the image using the ls "/romfs" cmd, but I cannot
connect to it, so I am pretty sure I have a project set up problem.

Looking to get to the point where I can get to use this Workbench 2.6
IDE on my linux machine!
Sydney

[Jason]

Yeah, working out what all the components do can be tricky.

For your purposes, the two bundles you've already added are
more than sufficient for running an RTP. For development purposes,
make sure you add the RTP Development bundle, rather than
the RTP Deployment bundle.

You say you have the RTP in ROMFS. Great... you should be
able to run it trivially from there. One thing is to make sure you're
trying to run it from the 'command' shell rather than the 'C' shell

(the command shell is like a Linux/Windows shell, whereas the
C shell is fundamentally a C interpreter)

'cmd' takes you to the command shell

-> cmd
[vxWorks *]#

You should be able to run your RTP from ROMFS

[vxWorks *]# /romfs/RTP.vxe &
[vxWorks *]#

Putting the & on the end runs the RTP unattached to the command shell
(like Linux).

You can see if your RTP is running using the rtp command

[vxWorks *]# rtp

NAME ID STATE ENTRY ADDR OPTIONS
TASK CNT
-------------------- ---------- --------------- ---------- ----------
--------
RTP.vxe 0x1bc96c8 STATE_NORMAL 0xf0906310
0x1 67

If you have problems getting to the command shell, then check
you have the component INCLUDE_SHELL_INTERP_CMD included
(development tool components->kernel shell components->shell
interpreter selection->command line interpreter)
from the Kernel Configurator

Two final notes - the command shell will tell you its loading an RTP,
and if you're
RTP doesn't at least spin, it will terminate as soon as it hits the
end of the main() function

Cheers!

Jason