News & Training

TECHNICAL Q&A

Lean XPE!

  • no.2215
  • 2004-03-31
Gents, I have been trying to get XPE to run on small/compact system for industrial controls. Having testing systems like DOS/OS9, I was curious to see how well XPE performed in this area. I started off with a working PC/104 board cnatining a 300MHz CPU that came with XPE loaded. But this configuration was sluggish and 'failed' my basic requirement for quick boot/runtime performance. Many suggestions have been put forward in this forum and elsewhere to overcome these issues and from all these information I decided to start from a clean slate and build a system from ground up. These are the following setup and results: Specifications: 1. Embedded system with basic VGA display, Serial Comm ports, keyboard and mouse only. 2. Compact Flash storage media for OS 2. Stand-alone operation. No networks etc 2. Low power fanless operation. Build Procedure: 1. Extracted PMQ files using TAP. Checked contents. Verified all the devices present - OK 2. Imported into Component Designer and added "Selector Prototype" option and build SLD file. Exported and registered to Component database -OK 3. From Target Designer added the above component and then pruned off all uncecessary components/devices except processor/bus related, serial ports, keyboard and mouse. This was done from the option box list in the settings. 3. Added Minlogon and Command Shell and checked dependencies. -OK, no errors 5. Build the OS image, no errors ~ 20MB as expected for this configuration 6. Loaded OS onto the Compact Flash (already prepared with fdisk,format(FAT) and Boorpreped) Results: 1. FBA completed succesfully within a few minutes for this minimal configuration. 2. System booted into command shell within 15 seconds (excl bios boot). Very good, given the use use of a slow CPU! 3. Test application software, ran well. However no comm ports were avaliable! Tried many other configuration to get comm ports in but failed. Checked bios, ports ok. Only when the full component set were added then ports appeared. By this time the file system has bloated to around 100MB with components like Explorer, IExplorer etc all appearing! and boot times slowed down to a sluggish 90 seconds! I am not sure at this stage whether it is the hardware or OS issues causing this. I have put this issue to a number of board manufacturers but none seem to have in-depth knowledge of XPE Has anynone got better results based on a lean system like above? I would like to hear from you and possibly purchase such a system from you... Thank you for your attention. Regards A.Chacko XPE Evaluator DBT