BSP Developer's Guide

1
Overview
1.1 Introduction
One strength of VxWorks is that it provides a high degree of architectural and
hardware independence for application code. This portability is due to VxWorks’s
modular design, which isolates all hardware-specific functionality into a set of
libraries called the Board Support Package (BSP). The BSP libraries provide an
identical software interface to the hardware functions of all boards. They include
facilities for hardware initialization, interrupt handling and generation, hardware
clock and timer management, mapping of local and bus memory spaces, memory
sizing, and so on.
Broadly speaking, there are several types of VxWorks porting activity:
■
Host Porting: Porting Tornado and VxWorks development capability to a
previously unsupported host.
■
■
■
■
Architecture Porting: Porting VxWorks and the Tornado debugger to a
previously unsupported target processor type or architecture.
Board Porting: Porting VxWorks to a new target board, for which there is
already an architecture port and a host port available.
Upgrading pre-Tornado BSPs to work with Tornado.
Porting an optional Component to a Tornado release.
Host ports and architecture ports require access to the entire VxWorks source code
and are outside the scope of this manual. Board porting, the focus of this manual,
requires access to just the hardware-dependent source within VxWorks and the
debugger. This source code is the BSP.
1