On Thu, 14 Oct 2004, Sam Song wrote: > I'd like to make sure about the meaning of BSP and > LSP. There is sth unclear in my mind, I am afraid.
>From what I know, the term BSP was coined as an acronym for "Board Support Package" in pre-Linux days. To me it is most familiar in conjunction with Embdedded (RT)OSes such as LynxOS, vxWorks, or pSOS and many others. These systems have a more or less clearly defined BSP API, meaning that a port to a new platform is a well defined process. Grossly simplified, the BSP provider must implement a number of support functions which make hardware resources (interrupts, memory and so forth) available to the common kernel code. Note also that this is valid across architectures (PPC, ARM, X86...). Linux still doesn't really offer something like this. Some people may argue that things are actually improving, but most people probably just don't care. The simplest reason I can think of for that is that there were always enough knowledgable people to do the hard porting work. Also, obviously, Linux doesn't care for commercial issues such like wanting to keep the common kernel code closed. "LSP" is a term introduced by MontaVista, AFAIR, so maybe one of the MV folks on this list wants to elaborate on this? Bottom line: BSP is an OS/Vendor specific term to capture the software components related to a specific board. It is a useful handle in project discussions, provided that all participants use the same notion. Regards, Marius -- Marius Groeger <mgroeger at sysgo.com> SYSGO AG Embedded and Real-Time Software Voice: +49 6136 9948 0 FAX: +49 6136 9948 10 www.sysgo.com | www.elinos.com | www.osek.de | www.imerva.com
