[Oberon] Oberon for Cortex-M7

[Chris Burrows]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Skulski, Wojciech [mailto:skulski at pas.rochester.edu]
> Sent: Sunday, 26 February 2017 2:55 PM
> To: chris at cfbsoftware.com; ETH Oberon and related systems
> Subject: RE: [Oberon] Oberon for Cortex-M7
> 
> Chris:
> 
>   does Astrobe run on bare metal, or does it run under an OS on the
> target board? If OS, then which flavor?
> 

The Cortex-M versions of Astrobe produce single-tasking realtime apps that
run on bare  metal. The RISC5 version of Astrobe targets the Project Oberon
OS.

> I looked at the list of HW features of the NUCLEO-F767ZI board. There
> is Ethernet among other things. How is it supported under Astrobe?
> 

We have not implemented any library modules for Ethernet. The Astrobe
Cortex-M libraries currently only target the hardware-specific features that
are available across all NXP and STM targets i.e. UART, Timers, GPIO, RTC,
SPI, I2C etc. Links to the feature matrix for each Cortex-M family are here:

http://www.astrobe.com/order.htm

SPI for STM32 is not on that list as we have only just finished implementing
it. That was particularly challenging and we have yet to do I2C.

The ever-increasing complexity of these microcontrollers is mind-boggling.
Does anybody actually need 14 different timers? There are more than 30
different variations of the STM32 Cortex-M3/4/7 family - the reference
manual for the STM32F76xxx and STM32F77xxx parts alone is 1900 pages. Then
there is the STM32F767xx DataSheet which is another 255 pages! 

We have considered running a competition to be the first to implement I2C in
Oberon for STM32. Maybe we should run one for Ethernet as well. Any takers?

Regards,
Chris

Chris Burrows
CFB Software
http://www.astrobe.com