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ICE or ICE-E on VxWorks or PharLap ETS

There hasn't been a thread talking about VxWorks since 2003. I'm evaluating distributed computing technologies for some multiplatform and embedded projects. Right now, ACE/TAO seems be to the platform of choice (largely on the basis of its portability), despite some of the advantages ICE offers. But since I've been itching to introduce ICE to my company for some time, I thought I'd toss out a couple of questions to see if there's any update re: porting ICE to different platforms.

Has anyone got ICE or ICE-E working on VxWorks, using either Diab or gcc?

How about PharLap ETS, using the Microsoft 6.00 compiler?

Michael W.

Comments

  • If you have a commercial interest for Ice on these platforms, please contact us at info@zeroc.com. Unfortunately, we cannot port Ice to these platforms without a commercial licensing commitment.
  • marc wrote:
    If you have a commercial interest for Ice on these platforms, please contact us at info@zeroc.com. Unfortunately, we cannot port Ice to these platforms without a commercial licensing commitment.

    I certainly understand, Marc. Thank you. I am not looking for porting services unrecompensed. I was simply inquiring if anyone in the community has attempted their own port to any of these platforms and, if so, what success they'd had.

    I'm seriously interested in using ICE for commercial projects, but the porting issue will be a big one. Adopting ICE in the first place will likely take some convincing on my part. I'm doing the initial legwork on my own, under the assumption that the best way I can gain support for adoption of a new distributed computing platform is to implement a proof of concept, see how it performs, see a reduction in application codebase (over a homegrown approach), and show that it can be ported to the platforms we require.

    - - Michael Watson
  • VxWorks port endeavored

    Hi,

    This is to announce to people who are interested (including ZeroC) that I have begun a port of IceE on VxWorks. I am involved in many distributed real-time projects and being able to replace ACE/TAO by Ice would really be nIce especially regarding memory management issues (complexity issues too!).

    I have just achieved a successful run of the "Printer" demo program with the Client running in the VxWorks Simulator and the Server on a Linux host workstation.:cool:

    Note: The Client is IceE whereas the Server is Ice.

    Looking forward to your comments and info on this.
  • bernard
    bernard Jupiter, FL
    Hi Shebli,

    Yes, Ice-E on VxWorks would be very nice, and we may very well add VxWorks support in the upcoming Ice-E 1.3 release :).

    Out of curiosity, on which hardware do you run VxWorks? Is this a device that goes into your underwater telescope? This could be a very interesting project for our new Projects forum ;).

    All the best,
    Bernard
  • bernard wrote: »
    Yes, Ice-E on VxWorks would be very nice, and we may very well add VxWorks support in the upcoming Ice-E 1.3 release :).
    The success of IceE will definitely depend on its port to the most widespread embedded and real-time platforms. For my projects and those of my lab, I'm aiming at VxWorks and RTEMS (btw, does ZeroC also consider RTEMS)

    As of today, I can run IceE, both as client and server, on the VxWorks simulator (VxSim on Pentium Linux, using the gnu toolchain). For this, I have had to modify snippets of the code, mainly concerning the low-level networking (e.g. replacing fcntl by ioctl or poll by select).

    If you are interested in this work, I can give you what I have done: I have tagged all modifications with a "#ifdef VXWORKS" directive. However, I have done nothing concerning the build chain, since I have used only the automatic Makefiles produced by Windriver Workbench (under Eclipse) after calling "by hand" slice2cppe on the relevant directories.
    bernard wrote: »
    Out of curiosity, on which hardware do you run VxWorks? Is this a device that goes into your underwater telescope? This could be a very interesting project for our new Projects forum ;).
    For the moment, I have tested the porting only on the simulator but I will very soon use it on a Xilinx Virtex4 platform. And yes, I intend to use Ice and IceE for the data acquisition system of the KM3Net underwater telescope. There is another project, in which me and my lab are involved, that might also use Ice: the ground segment of a Gamma ray burst detection satellite (the project's provisional name is Svom).
  • bernard
    bernard Jupiter, FL
    Hi Shebli,

    Thanks for the follow-up, these projects look very interesting.

    We have no plans for RTEMS support at present; however, if the CEA wants to sponsor this port, this could change. Please contact us at info@zeroc.com if you're interested.

    We're making many changes to the Ice-E source code for Ice-E 1.3, so we may not be able to reuse your port. However, I am sure other Ice/Ice-E users are interested in your Ice-E 1.2 VxWorks port, and it would be great if you could post the corresponding patch and build instructions on our Patches forum.

    Thanks,
    Bernard
  • Any update of vxWorks topic

    Any plan to port ICE to vxWorks at this point?