Documentation/ReleaseNotes/NuttX-6.32

NuttX-6.32
----------

The 99th release of NuttX, Version 6.32, was made on December 7, 2013,
and is available for download from the SourceForge website. Note
that release consists of two tarballs: nuttx-6.32.tar.gz and
apps-6.32.tar.gz. Both may be needed (see the top-level nuttx/README.txt
file for build information).

Additional new features and extended functionality:

* General:

- Extension and standardization of stack debug logic. Now includes
coloration of the IDLE and interrupt stacks as well as the heap.
Suggested by David Sidrane.

* Audio Subsystem and Audio Drivers:

- I2S interface definition. Integrates with audio sub-system.
- VS1053 worker thread stack size is now configurable and assigned a
name via pthread_setname_np(). From Ken Pettit.

* Networking / Network Drivers

- Updates and adaptations to support for TI CC3000 wireless module
from David Sidrane. These updates include multi-threading support
and interface and header file changes to integrate more seamlessly
with NuttX applications.

* File Systems:

- procfs: Add support for a tiny procfs file system. The initial
offering is little more that a proof of concept but may be developed
further in subsequent releases.
- NXFFS: An initial attempt was made to integrate NXFFS with the NAND
MTD driver. Changes were made to handle bad blocks. However, I
later realized that NXFFS cannot handle NAND because the way that
is re-writes blocks is incompatible with the NAND ECC handling.
These changes were backed-out so as not to introduce turmoil, but
can be re-enabled if needed via configuration option.
- NXFFS: Make the start up scan of the media a configuration option.
It just takes to long and is not really necessary! Those rare cases
where the scan was helpful can be fixed using MDIOC_BULKERASE IOCTL
command.

* General Drivers:

- I2S: A simple character driver was added to support I2S accesses.
This driver in its current state is intended only to support I2C
testing and would not be appropriate to used for any real driver
application.

* MTD Drivers

- Add a container for an MTD device that can be used to provide a
simple, lightweight interface to configuration data storage that
resides on some storage media that is wrapped as an MTD device.
From Ken Pettit.
- New interface definition for lower half NAND drivers.
- MTD Nand: Add MTD NAND driver that will support ONFI devices,
non-ONFI devices (via table lookup), bad block checking, software
ECC (Hamming), and will interact with the lower-half, hardware-
specific, NAND driver. Based on BSD-compatible Atmel sample code.
- MTD geometry structure is now packed so that it can support larger
erase block sizes needed by NAND without increasing the size of
the geometry structure.
- SST25: Add another SST25 SerialFlash driver, sst25xx.c. This one
differs from sst25.c in that it supports larger SST25 parts: In
the larger parts support page write instead of byte/word writes
like the smaller parts. From Ken Pettit.

* USB Drivers

- STM32 F1 USB Device: Add support for decoded USB trace strings.
From David Sidrane.

* ARM

- Add more ARM9 cache management functions to flush and invalidate
D-Cache for DMA support.

* Atmel AT91 SAMA5D3x Drivers:

- Many new drivers including CAN, PWM, SSC/I2S
- PCK: Add support for programmable clock outputs.
- NAND: Driver with hardware ECC and DMA support

* Atmel AT91 SAMA5D3x Boards:

- SAMA5D3x-EK: Add support for the apps/examples/i2schar test.
- SAMA5D3x-EK: Provides board-specific memory controller initialize
for NAND flash.
- SAMA5D3x-EK: Add support for "auto-mounting" NAND MTD block driver
or NXFFS file system.

* Atmel AT91 SAM3/4 Boards:

- Basic support for the Atmel SAM4E family. From Mitko.

* STMicro STM32:

- Added support for the STM32F429. From Ken Pettit.
- Added support for GPIOK and GPIOJ. From Ken Pettit.

* STMicro STM32 Drivers

- STM32 F4 OTG FS/HS Device: OTG FS device and host drivers extended
so that they can support either the OTG FS peripheral or the OTG HS
peripheral (in FS mode). This was done as a quick way to get USB
support on the STM32F429 which has only OTG HS. From Ken Pettit.
- Added header files and driver framework for the STM32F429 LTDC
framebuffer driver. From Ken Pettit.

* STMicro STM32 Boards:

- Support for the Spark board was completely by Davide Sidrane. The
Spark configuration includes integrated CC3000 wireless support, FAT
file system on the SerialFlash and a composite device that can be
used both to export the FAT file system and to provide a serial
interface.
- The Mikroe-stm32f4 now uses /dev/config for configuration data
storage. From Ken Pettit.
- Added support for the STM32F429I-Discovery board from Ken Pettit.
- Added board support for the ViewTool STM32F103/F107 board with the
STM32F107VCT6 installed.

* NXP LPC31xx Drivers:

- USB ECHI HCD: Add a driver for the low-/full-/high-speed variant
of the EHCI host controller.

* NXP LPC31xx Boards:

- Board-specific USB host support for the Embedded Artists EA3131 board.
(Missing PCA9532 controls).
- Add support for the Olimex LPC-H3131 board. Including USB host
support (which does not depend on the PCA8532 interface).

* Kinetis KL Drivers:

- PWM driver for the Freescale Kinetis KL family from Alan Carvalho
de Assis.

* Kinetis KL Boards

- Freedom-KL25Z: Add PWM support from Alan Carvalho de Assis.

* TI Stellaris LM3S

- Don't initialize .data in start-up logic if not running from FLASH.

* Applications:

- apps/platform: A new home for platform-specific application code.
- Define a common interface that can be used to manage platform-
specific configuration data. From Ken Pettit.
- apps/examples/configdata: A unit test for the MTD configuration
data driver from Ken Pettit.
- Aapps/platform/mikroe-stm32f4: dd platform-specific storage of
configuration data for the Mikroe-stm32f4. From Ken Pettit.
- apps/examples/cc3000: Fine tuning of memory usage from David Sidrane.
- apps/system/nxplayer: Play thread stack size is now configurable.
All NxPlayer threads now have names assigned via pthread_setname_np().
From Ken Pettit.
- apps/examples/i2schar: The I2S test based on the I2S character
driver.
- apps/examples/hidkbd/hidkbd_main.c: Now calls a function named
arch_usbhost_initialize() that must be provided by the platform-
specific code.
- NSH:

- hexdump: Add skip= and count= options to the hexdump command. From Ken Pettit.
- Allow USB trace without a USB console. From David Sidrane.
- Mount command updates from Ken Pettit.
- Add an option to the mkfatfs command to specify FAT12, FAT16, or FAT32.

* Tools

- tools/mkctags.sh: A script for creating ctags from Ken Pettit.

Efforts In Progress. The following are features that are partially
implemented but present in this release. They are not likely to be
completed soon.

* kconfig-fronted Configuration:

- Conversion of old configurations to use the kconfig-frontends
tool is an ongoing effort that will continue for some time.
At this time, only 50% of the configurations have been converted
to use the kconfig-frontends tools.

Bugfixes (see the ChangeLog for details). Some of these are very important:

* File Systems

- FAT: In one error return case, the error return value was not being
set, making the failure look like success. From David Sidrane.
- mount: SMART FS must be included in the conditional compilation for
the set of file systems that require block drivers. From Daniel
Palmer.
- SmartFS: Fixed a minor bug with SMART partition number reporting
that would only be seen if both partition support and multi-root
directory support are enabled at the same time. From Ken Pettit.
- Deadlock: The inode semaphore must be re-entrant. Here is the re-
entrant path that I found: (1) USB host connects to FLASH drive and
creates /dev/sda, (2) /dev/sda is mounted, (3) FLASH drive is
removed but /dev/sda is not destroyed because there is still a
reference on the device because of the mount, (4) umount() is
called, taking the inode semaphore, now the driver tries to destroy
the block driver by calling unregister_blockdriver(). But (5)
unregister_blockdriver() also takes the inode semaphore causing a
deadlock if the inode semaphore is not re-entrant.
- FAT: Fix a typo in the FAT16 formatting logic. Was this ever able to
format a FAT16 volume?

* MTD Drivers

- MTD Partitions: Fix erase block vs page block confusion. From Ken
Pettit
- SST25 Serial Flash: Improved write performance by fixing a bug that
prevented operation in the faster write mode. From David Sidrane.

* USB Drivers:

- USB MSC Device: pthread_join() does not work if called from a
different task group than the pthread. This is correct behavior,
but still a problem. The correct solution would be configure the
USB MSC thread to a task, however, this workaround from David
Sidrane plugs the hole for now.
- USB CDC/ACM, USB MSC, and Composite Device Classes: Un-initialization
logic caused reuse of a stale pointer. Changed to a two pass
un-initialization for the case of the composite driver: Memory
resources are not freed until the second un-initialization pass.
From David Sidrane.

* STMicro STM32 Drivers:

- STM32 F1 USB Device: Fix some errors that cause crashes when the USB
was disconnected. From David Sidrane.
- STM32 F1 USB Device: Correct EP0 state handling logic when buffers
larger than the EP0 packet size are sent. From David Sidrane.
- STM32 F1 USB Device: The long outstanding bug involving the handling
of OUT SETUP commands has been fixed in the STM32 F1 USB device
driver by David Sidrane.
- Kconfig: Add missing setup of CAN TSEG1 and TSEG2 values. From
Martin Lederhilger.

* Tools

- tools/mkconfig.c: SMART FS must be included in the conditional
compilation for the set of writable file systems. Noted by Daniel
Palmer.

* Applications:

- apps/platform/Makefile: Was not dealing with the bin sub-directory
correctly.
- apps/system/composite/composite_main.c: The wrong handle was getting
nullified. From David Sidrane.

NuttX-6.33
----------

The 100th release of NuttX, Version 6.33, was made on January 30, 2014,
and is available for download from the SourceForge website. Note
that release consists of two tarballs: nuttx-6.33.tar.gz and
apps-6.33.tar.gz. Both may be needed (see the top-level nuttx/README.txt
file for build information).

Additional new features and extended functionality:

* Core OS Interfaces

- nanosleep() added. sleep() and usleep() are no longer core OS
interfaces. These have been moved into the library and re-implemented
as simple wrappers around nanosleep().

* File Systems

- procfs restructured by Ken Pettit. Added files for MTD status.
- procfs extended to show uptime and task group status.
- procfs now shows stack information.

* Networking

- Add support for the SO_LINGER socket option. Extended from logic
provided by Jason Jiang. Enabled with CONFIG_NET_SOLINGER.
- TCP write buffering support added. From Jason Jiang.
- Changes from Max Holtzberg to improve how network status is
reported. New controls to manage carrier detect.

* Graphics

- Massive reshuffling of files with little or no logic changes. This
reshuffling was necessary to build graphics applications with the
kernel builds where the graphics application lie in user space and
the core graphic server likes in kernel space. Moved much logic out
of nuttx/graphics to a new user library, libnx.

* Cortex-A5/A8/A9

- Existing Cortex-A5 support updated to include Cortex-A8/9.
- Add the syscall.h header file needed for the Cortex-A architecture.
- Start-up logic now supports execution from FLASH with .data and
.bss in SDRAM. This was not possible prior to this because .bss
and .data were initialized before SDRAM was configured.

* Allwinner A10:

- Basic support for the Allwinner A10 (Cortex-A8) is in place.

* Allwinner A10 boards

- Support for the pcDuino v1 board has been added. This support
is not yet very mature and still lacks many drivers. It is a
good starting point, however, if anyone wants to develop A10
support.

* Atmel SAMA5D3X

- Start-up logic now supports execution from FLASH with .data and
.bss in SDRAM. This was not possible prior to this because .bss
and .data were initialized before SDRAM was configured.

* Atmel SAMA5D3X Boards

- Partial logic in place to support the OV2640 camera. Still needs
quite a bit of additional logic to be useful.

* ARMv7-M

- Add support for high priority, nested interrupts. This change
effects not only core ARMv-7M logic, but all ARMv7-M MCU logic:
LM3S, LM4F, LPC17xx, LPC43xx, SAM3, SAM4, and STM32. See
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/NUTTX/High+Performance%2C+Zero+Latency+Interrupts

* STMicro STM32

- Add clocking support for STM32F107 USB OTG FS (which does not yet
work)
- Single-wire UART support for the F1 series from Thomas Grubler.

* STMicro STM32 Boards

- The Viewtool board can now be configured to support either the
STM32F103VCT6 or the STM32F107VCT6.
- The Viewtool STM32F107VCT6 now supports networking with the
DP83848C module installed.
- Add support for Viewtool SSD1289-based LCD on the Viewtool
STM32F103VCT6 board (untested)
- Add support for the XPT2046 touchscreen controller on the Viewtool
LCD module connected to the Viewtool STM32F103 board.
- Added kernel mode build support for the STM3240G-EVAL board. Added
a new kernel mode NxWM build configuration
- C++ static constructor logic from the nuttx/configs/stm3240g-eval/
directory to the apps/platform/stm3240g-eval/up_cxxinitialize.c
where is belongs so that it is available in user-space in the kernel
mode build.
- Add native Windows build support for the Olimex STM32 P107. From
Max Holtzberg
- Support for the STM32VL-Discovery board. Contributed by Alan
Carvalho de Assis
- Added a configuration for testing simple configurations on the
PX4FMU v2.

* ZiLOG ZNEO Boards

- Add an NSH configuration for the Z16F2800100ZCOG ZNEO board.
- Added support for the Toyaga 16Z ZNEO board. The 16Z board is
based on the ZiLOG ZNEOZ16F2811AL20EG part. See
https://github.com/toyaga/16z for further information
- Developed a patch to work around a compiler error that is revealed
when building the NSH configuration.

* Architecture-Independent Drivers

- OV2640 Camera Driver.
- Support for the Sharp Memory LCD from Librae.

* Library

- Pattern matching logic extended to handle set of characters and
ranges of character values. From Ken Pettit.
- sleep() and usleep() moved into the C library. These are not
longer core OS interfaces; they are simple wrappers for the
nanosleep().
- Add an implementation of gets_s().
- Extend fopen() to include support for C11 exclusive open ("x")
open mode.
- Add an implementation of stpcpy()
- strtol(), strtoll, strtoul(), strtoull(), and strtod() from
libc/string to libc/stdlib where they belong.

* Header Files

- Add rsize_t to include/sys/types.h
- Add the C11 thread.h header file

* Configuration/Build System

- Top level Makefile now supports qconfig and/or gconfig targets that
may be used for configuration. These may be used if you build
kconfig-frontends with support for kconfig-qconf and/or
kconfig-gconf.
- Add CONFIG_DEBUG_NOOPT. Now you can independently enable/disable
debug symbols and optimization
- File system related header files moved to include/nuttx/fs
- Video related header files moved to include/nuttx/video
- Changes for native Windows build: fix creation of a .version file
if one does not exist. Make sure that the APPDIR environment
variable is set before configuring. From Max Holtzberg.
- Board configuration sub-directory can now be specified. The default
need not be used. This is only useful when CONFIG_ARCH_BOARD_CUSTOM
is selected and there is no meaningful default sub-directory.
- Many functions renamed to better conform with the naming standard:
up_buttoninit() renamed to board_button_initialize(), up_buttons()
renamed to board_buttons(), up_irqbutton() renamed to
board_button_irq(), up_ledinit() renamed to board_led_initialize(),
up_ledon() renamed to board_led_on(), and up_ledoff() renamed to
board_led_off(). All prototypes removed from board.h header files.
Now ONLY prototypes in include/nuttx/arch.h.

* Applications

- NSH: Refactor. Separate NSH command handling and command execution
from NSH line parsing.
- NSH: Will now support multiple commands on a command line, each
separated with a semi-colon.
- NSH: Add support of commands enclosed in back quotes as command
arguments.
- NSH: Can now handle arguments that are concatenations of constant
strings, command return data, application return data, and
environment variables.
- NSH: Add true and false commands.
- NSH: Add support for while-do-done and until-do-done loops. These
only work when executing a script file because they depend on the
ability to seek in the file to implement the looping behaviors.
Can be conditionally compiled out to reduce footprint.
- NSH: Loosen up if-then-else-fi syntax to allow a command to be on
the same line as the then or else tokens like:
"if true; then echo true; else echo false; fi". More like bash.
- NSH: Add a break command that can be executed with a loop to
terminate the loop immediately.

- system/inifile: A simple .INI file parser.
- system/vi: Add support for a tiny, VI work-alike editor. This is
a minimal full screen editor that works with a terminal emulator
that using VT100 commands.

Efforts In Progress. The following are features that are partially
implemented but present in this release. They are not likely to be
completed soon.

* kconfig-fronted Configuration:

- Conversion of old configurations to use the kconfig-frontends
tool is an ongoing effort that will continue for some time.
At this time, only 53% of the configurations have been converted
to use the kconfig-frontends tools.

Bugfixes (see the ChangeLog for details). Some of these are very important:

* Core OS

- Added missing sem_timedwait() system call.

* Networking

- Prevent tcp_connect callback from being double freed. From Max
Holtzberg
- uiplib: Support new definitions and state passing for network
device status. From Maz Holtzberg.

* File Systems

- FAT: (1) A correction to FAT cluster allocation, and (2) Fix to some
root directory logic that was conditionally done only for FAT 32.
Apparently this needs to done for all FAT types. Both from Andrew
"Tridge" Tridgell via Lorenz Meier.

* Binary Formats

- Fix a small memory leak when attempting to load a program from a file.

* Cortex-A8/9

- Fix some errors in the cache invalidation logic (only seem to matter
for Cortex-A8).
- Add more nop's after enabling the MMU. The cortex-a8 seems to need
these

* Graphics

- Fix a typo that caused a compilation error when
CONFIG_NXCONSOLE_BPP < 8. From Librae

* ARMv7-M

- Correct alignment of RAM vector table.
- Interrupt handling: Do not disable and enable the IRQ on each
entry, (2) this interferes with controlling the IRQ interrupt
setting from interrupt handlers, and (3) up_disable_irq() does
not work anyway so that this has never done anything.
- Fix all implementations of up_disable_irq() for all Cortex-M3 and
M4 architectures: To enable an interrupt on the Cortex-M3/4 CPU,
you need to set a bit in the ISER register. To disable the
interrupt, you need to set a bit in the ICER register. Existing
logic was trying to disable interrupts by clearing the bit in the
ISER register. That will not work; writing a '0' to the ISER
register has no effect. That means that up_disable_irq() was
doing nothing! It turns out that that is not really important
because up_disable_irq() is not really used for that purpose. But
some spurions STM32 ADC interrupts have been reported to me and this
turned out to be the cause in that case. Thanks to Manuel Stühn for
the tip.

* STMicro STM32

- Fix configuration and pin definitions that would prevent building
USB for the connectivity and performance lines.
- STM32L15xx: Fix a typo in USB pin definitions
- Fix pin definition names for SPI2 MOSI and MISO. Noted by Brian Webb
- Various fixes for STM32F103ZE SPI3 pin mapping definitions. From
Steve Redler IV

* STMicro STM32 Boards

- Olimex STM32-P107: Failed to build if SPI3 for UEXT is not remapped.
From Max Holtzberg

* x86 Boards

- Add a configuration option to select the -m32 compiler option when
building for a 32-bit target on a native 64-bit compiler. So far,
only used for the qemu/i486 configuration.
- Patch from Matt Campbell to fix 'Error: .size expression for idle_stack
does not evaluate to a constant".

* Library

- strftime(): Needs null termination on the generated string. From
Max Holtzberg.
- Typo in ctype.h macro name: iscntrl(), not iscontrol().
- If there are no arguments (argc == 1), then getopt() will leave the
optind variable in an undefined state (2014-1-20).
- ARMv7-M memcpy(): Assembler changes with the gcc-47 distribution
from ARM mean that we need to be explicit about branch sizes; one
or more of the wide branch opcodes results in bad table branching.
From Mike Smith.

* Configuration/Build System

- Fixes for some tools/ for Windows build issues from Max Holtzberg.
- Config.mk: 'cypath' must be called if we are using a Windows native
toolchain with the Cygwin 'make' to convert paths to proper
Windows paths. From Richard Cochran.
- ARM Makefile: Dependency directory list is now computed from the
VPATH. From Richard Cochran.
- builtin/Makefile: Fixes for native Windows build from Max Holtzberg.
- Refactor some configuration dependencies: NSH networking features
should depend on netutil selections; netutil selections, in turn,
should depend on networking selections.

* Applications

- NSH: Modified the df -h logic to eliminate truncating numbers in
conversion (like 7900 -> 7M). From Ken Pettit.