Anyone using an Intel Mac as their embedded dev system?

I'm planning to switch sometime later this year. For the "Windows only programs" problem, a workaround, if not a solution, is to run a Windows OS under emulation. (Or the program itself under Wine, if it runs OK)

One of the projects I am currently working on, is based on a Texas Instruments 28F12 DSP. Their development tool set, "Code Composer Studio", is for Windows only, of course. I am typing this on an AMD Athlon 3800+ machine, running Ubuntu Linux, with CCS running on a second window, under Windows 2000, under qemu. The performance is acceptable.

PS: JTAG should not be a problem with an Ethernet based JTAG emulator. At work I'm using a BlackHawk LAN560, but I have not tried it yet from an emulated machine.

Roberto Waltman [ please reply to the group, return address is invalid ]

I don't know the specific answer, but (as an OpenBSD nut who runs Windows clients behind an OpenBSD firewall) it strikes me that - assuming you're using GNU/gcc - the common BSD base *should* mean it should be fine.

In an ideal world. With a following wind. Good luck.

Steve

Hi Roberto,

Thanks for the reply!

I guess I should have clarified here - I want to run OS X on the Mac. The issue - which is explained in one of the followups to my thread in c.s.m.s - is that I recently introduced a policy that prohibits, among other things, Windows machines from having live Internet connections. (It is the only way to keep them free of evil software). See

My primary machine has to be:

- a laptop

- (effective requirement) running a UNIX variant

I know I can do everything I want to do under Linux on a PC laptop. However support for laptop hardware and particularly power managment is relatively poor and (worse) not well characterized under Linux. For example I am unaware of any modern machine that can transit through all ACPI power levels including suspend to RAM and survive this process, while running Linux (even with the latest DSDT patches etc etc etc).

MacOS X is attractive because it's a UNIX variant at heart and can build all my tools without complaint, and it has guaranteed support for the power management and miscellaneous hardware in the MacBook Pro.

This is good news :)

I'm not familiar with that particular product. I've not yet been able to cost-justify an Ethernet JTAG, but if there was a single product that supported PPC603e, ARM7 and ARM9, I could justify perhaps $2K on it. I doubt I'll find something in that budget, though.

Hi. Yes, I understood, sorry if my reply was somehow misleading. I am planning to run OS X also, not Linux, and for more or less the same reasons you have. I only wanted to point out that there is a way around for those applications that can not run natively under OS X. The Linux example is just what I happen to have in front of me right now. Since the new Macs processors are vanilla X86, I hope some time soon a virtualization product like VMWare will be available for OS-X, to improve the performance of emulated machines.

Roberto Waltman [ please reply to the group, return address is invalid ]

If source is available, it should be possible to make gcc-based cross-development toolchains (I do this for Win32 DLL and EXE, from OS X, using MinGW GNU tools).

This can be a great option. The Microchip IDE and compilers work nicely in WINE in GUI and command line modes. (I've tried this in Linux, not OS X, though I use OS X as my main development machine - Eclipse as IDE, of course.)

Yes, sure, but the problem is not the compiler - it's physically flashing the target. This is better supported under Linux than OSX. And no parallel port on a Mac :)

Is wine working/supported/moderately stable on Intel OSX yet?

Yes, I am contemplating it for the same reasons. I have a pretty good feeling that most tools will now be translated to run on OS X as well.#

But to give you some more nice news: if everything breaks, you can simply boot WIndowsXP on your Intel Mac. There is a wonderful dual boot solution in the freeware. Apple "doesn't care" and as long as your copy of XP is leagel, this seems to be a very viable option.

I am quite sure that we will see VMWare on Intel Mac very soon as well.

Matthias

Segger's J-Link is about $400 or so and comes with a TCP/IP server app. You could have a Windows drone purely for JTAG and network to that with it firewalled up to the hilt to allow only access to the JTAG probe. That would cost a lot less than $2K and certainly supports all the ARMs, don't know about the PPC support though.

The preceding sounds like the thing I saw where someone was decrying the good ol' days where one could start a compilation and go have supper while it completed. He came up with something involving a 6502 emulation that would degrade performance sufficiently to get back to the more relaxed pace of earlier times.

It happened sooner than expected: