| Hello-- I have a shipped industrial product that uses leJOS 2.1.0. It's a embedded system controller for a system that measures the spectral transmission of large numbers of 35mm print film patches - a 5,000 frame roll takes about 12 hours to measure. The system was developed using Mac OS X and a USB tower on a somewhat old G4 PowerBook host, then deployed using IRIX and a serial tower on an unbelievably antique SGI O2 host. I want to replace that SGI O2 with a MacBook Pro laptop. That introduces two (or three) new factors: (1) it's Mac OS X on a machine with little-endian byte order (2) it's a dual-processor machine (3) the USB substrate may be different; on the other hand I've verified on my G4 that the Keyspan serial adapter hardware and driver work just fine for using the serial tower, and Keyspan has a Mac Intel driver, so (3) isn't a deal-breaking issue. My questions are: - how much of leJOS 2.1.0 assumes that if it's running on Mac OS X, e.g. #ifdef __APPLE__, it's big-endian? - are there multi-threaded parts of leJOS 2.1.0 that might expose race conditions on a dual-proc machine? Have people out there used leJOS on dual-proc hardware? I would really rather not make the leap to leJOS 3.whatever unless I need to do so. The leJOS 2.1.0-based system works great, but the O2 is showing its age and I don't know that one can readily get parts. If I'm replacing it, I'd like to be forward-looking and go with an Intel Mac. There is the set of tests in the regression dir, but that depends on the emulator working, which is not the case in lejos 2.1.0 on Mac OS X. So I'm looking for an opinion from the leJOS maintainers and user base here on endian dependencies. I do have the opportunity to test this without having to buy a machine first -- Apple has a hardware compatibility lab for registered developers in Cupertino, and I am only about 45 minutes away from there. So if people have particular areas of concern and associated tests to run I could try them out (and if someone wants a test compile of leJOS 3.whatever, or a metering run on the new hardware, I'd be only too happy to do that as a form of repayment.) Anyone? Comments? --joseph ps: in the worst case I just buy a final-G4-model PowerBook, but jeez, it hurts so much to give up on the 2X-4X speed bump... -=-=-=-=-=- -=-=-=-=-=- -=-=-=-=-=- -=-=-=-=-=- -=-=-=-=-=- As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls. |
- [Lejos-discussion] leJOS 2.1.0 on Intel-based Mac OS X? Joseph Goldstone
