When we first became interested with the OpenRISC softcore, its Linux port was already well on the way to become part of the official 3.1 kernel, a major step forward for the architecture. Looking for other OS support we were surprised to find that the eCos port for OpenRISC was old, unmaintained and not runnable any more.

We felt that since we wanted to do it anyway for our own purposes, getting it up and running again would be a welcome contribution.

We updated the port to eCos 3.0, fixed what was broken and run it on the OpenRISC development board when it became available to verify that it is functional.

The port can now be grabbed from the OpenCores website, and Ant Micro is its official maintainer, with Piotr Skrzypek as the responsible person.

The original post which accompanied the release can be found on our blog.