Hmmm, good news as in some level of official support, but mixed on what Peter is up to... I finally am making some sense of some beyond-Hello-World peculiarities of mspgcc. BSP looks like something I might look at when I grow up...
Let me add a /vintén/, maybe somewhat off-topic but maybe relevant in the Big Picture. For too long now, I have been involved with the One Laptop Per Child community and several offshots. Personally I am convinced that MCUs are one very meaningful next step for the few that are capable. When by accident it turned out that I was able to do Launchpad with little pain using an OLPC XO laptop, I was hooked to the mspgcc tools. Low cost + actually working in Linux is an unbeatable combination, for me and this peculiar market of kids everywhere, a handful of them with enormous potential but nowhere to go I am finding it is not easy at all, despite TI's official support and forums and such. Maybe because so far mspgcc was very much the poor relative? I can get any sort of Arduino code for pretty much anything, for the Launchpad it's a toss, and then what I find is likely for some other toolchain, with enough nuances in the code as to make it very hard for me, and well nigh impossible for XO kids to move beyond the very basic. Now, Wikipedia says one of the two major TI Divisions is Education. Hopefully it goes beyond http://xkcd.com/768 ;.) and then, as TI figures out how to better work with us open source types, mspgcc will get some well needed boost, and we all benefit - and TI too, they have much to gain if they become relevant for this peculiar, tiny but oh so important segment of the market, where well-placed investment could make a real impact. On 10/26/2012 04:33 AM, Peter Bigot wrote: > On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 4:01 AM, Mitnacht, Thomas <t-mitna...@ti.com> wrote: >> Hello GCC-enthusiasts! >> >> We wanted to give everyone in the MSPGCC community some exciting news >> regarding the MSP430(tm) MCU portfolio and its GCC offering. TI is >> collaborating with Red Hat to develop a new GCC offering that will >> incorporate as much as feasible of what the community has developed. The >> team at Texas Instruments cannot thank the community enough for all of the >> efforts involved in improving our GCC offering for MSP430 MCUs! With your >> help, TI has been able to grow closer to the open source community & GCC has >> become a key part of MSP430 MCU strategy. The MSP430 team looks forward to >> this new partnership to further improve our open source presence. We are >> working with Red Hat to create a new GCC offering for MSP430 MCUs and future >> platforms, with the ultimate goal of being upstreamed into the main FSF GCC >> branch that is actively supported for the long-term. >> >> We are aiming to have a working beta before the end of the year, and are >> shooting for a public release sometime early next year. Stay tuned. >> >> The MSP430 Team > As the sole maintainer of mspgcc and its component packages for the > last two years, I endorse this decision. > > I originally started contributing simply because I wanted an MSP430 > toolchain that supported the CC430 and that I could run on Linux > without paying $4K for the privilege of running an IDE under a Windows > emulator. I continued because I thought it needed doing, was able to > do it, and mostly enjoyed it. > > Today, I believe LTS-20120406 (gcc 4.6) and dev 20120911 (gcc 4.7 with > 20-bit MSP430 support) have both been demonstrated to be remarkably > stable, supporting the entire MSP430 product line comprising over 350 > MCUs. I have no plans for further enhancements or releases of mspgcc. > I will probably continue to provide patches for any serious bugs that > are reported until the new implementation is available. I have also > offered to be a resource to Red Hat and TI to assist in preserving the > existing capabilities and interfaces of mspgcc to whatever degree is > appropriate. > > However, a majority of my effort has been, well, unpaid (which is NOT > the intended meaning of "free software"). It's time to focus on other > things, such as http://pabigot.github.com/bsp430/ and other > infrastructure tools and environments associated with my consulting > business. I've taken mspgcc as far as I personally care to, and look > forward to somebody else taking responsibility for the next steps. > Somebody who has the necessary influence with the GCC core developers > to push for internal changes that will make supporting such an unusual > architecture simpler, the experience to implement the reload > optimizations that would help mspgcc generate more "atomic" code, and > the time and motivation to update gdb to support all the CPUX > enhancements that have been added to binutils. I believe the open > source MSP430 development community will benefit greatly from the > involvement of Red Hat with TI support. > > Peter > >> Texas Instruments Deutschland GmbH, Haggertystr. 1, D-85356 Freising. >> Amtsgericht M?nchen HRB 40960. Gesch?ftsf?hrer: Dr. Wolfram Tietscher. >> Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrates: Edgar Frank >> >> >> >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> Everyone hates slow websites. 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