Updates

Lots of work on the source tree over the last two weeks:

• The Plasma RTOS is out and FreeRTOS is in. FreeRTOS is much, much better designed overall than Plasma, which basically was just "some RTOS" (most of them do basically the same things overall). Should be a major win as far as the overall design of the Controlix source system.

• The BareMetalOS exokernel is also out. FreeRTOS comes with code to handle the boot-and-initialization process and well as the low-level interfaces to filesystems, both of which Plasma basically lacked and which BMOS was going to provide.

• FreeRTOS also has has support for the pthreads API (FreeRtos+POSIX), so I no longer need to make a different port of the SpecC system threading API. MUCH less work for me, and removes a major quirk in the process of supporting the SpecC simulation library (and the SpecC-using Controlix applications and libraries it depends on).

• Finally, FreeRTOS can run on top of the POSIX (Linux, basically) API instead of on top of bare metal (or an emulator), which means that I can develop without needing to worry about putting together a native bootloader+filesystem image for use with an emulator or a bare metal boot at this time. It all appears to be stable and functional, which means I can recommend the whole kit and kaboodle to other developers.

Jon