Enhancements to Platform Features

A brief description of the enhancements to the platform features follows:

Boot Framework

The ChorusOS boot framework has been enhanced so that it can use the DHCP protocol to retrieve the system image and boot it on the local node, provided there is a correctly configured DHCP server on the network.

The boot framework provides a fail-safe oriented boot logic, hard coded in the bootMonitor actor. See "Boot Storage Device" for more information.

Compact PCI Hot Swap Support

The ChorusOS Board Support Package (BSP) hot swap feature allows you to remove and insert a board safely, without requiring you to shut the operating system down. BSP hot swap provides an infrastructure that facilitates the starting and stopping of the driver corresponding to a board that is inserted or removed. For more information on this feature, refer to "BSP Hot Swap" in the ChorusOS 5.0 Features, Architecture and Performance Overview.

Device Driver Manager Proxy

The Device Driver Manager proxy is a logical component that acts as a proxy between the various drivers that must be managed (through DDI/DKI calls) and a client in supervisor mode. The client is typically the C_OS and relays commands to and from the Management framework.

The purpose of the Device Driver Manager proxy is to hide the use of the DDI/DKI specificities to the upper layers and to isolate implementation-specific aspects (such as the use of DKI-threads).

This proxy exports a Management API, so that a supervisor application can perform management operations without any knowledge in the DKI/DDIs.

High Resolution Timer

The High Resolution Timer provides access to a fine-grained counter source for applications. This API is available in both a user and microkernel execution context on top of the ChorusOS operating system. See "Administration" in the ChorusOS 5.0 Features, Architecture and Performance Overview

IDE/ATA DDI

A new architecture has been implemented to provide support for IDE disks and CompactFlash devices. The new architecture includes new Disk and ATA DDIs. For more information, see "IDE/ATA DDI".

NVRAM DDI

The NVRAM device driver provides a basic interface that abstracts the access methods to the underlying NVRAM hardware. The driver implements routines allowing the device driver client to read from or write to the NVRAM space.

PowerPC 74x0 Support

Support for the PowerPC 74x0 processor is new in version 5.0 of the ChorusOS operating system. The new board for this processor is mcpn765.

Watchdog Timer DDI

Allows you to manage the watchdog timer. See "Application Watchdog" for more information.