Binary BSP

May 25, 2009 14:11 GMT  ·  By

Windows Embedded CE 6.0 Virtual PC 2007 Binary BSP (board support package) is now up for grabs from Microsoft. The software giant indicated that the sample was made available for download due to the feedback from consumers in relation to offering support for the company's virtualization technology from the CE 6.0 flavor of the Windows Embedded platform. With the unsupported package, Microsoft attempted to streamline deployment and configuration. In fact, Windows Embedded CE 6.0 Virtual PC 2007 Binary BSP is already set up with a variety of components to get customers up and running in no time.

“I get a reasonable number of questions about supporting Virtual PC 2007 from Windows Embedded CE 6.0. We’ve just published a CE 6.0 Binary BSP for Virtual PC 2007 on the MSDN Code Gallery site. Note that this is not an officially supported BSP (don’t phone product support, the only support mechanism will be through the Code Gallery discussions page),” revealed Mike Hall, software architect. “The Virtual PC BSP ships with a Virtual Hard Drive (.VHD) and Virtual Floppy Disk so you don't need to create any boot media before starting to use CE 6.0 and the Virtual PC BSP.”

Board support package, according to Microsoft, is used to reference all board hardware-specific code. The Redmond company indicated that BSP came to the table with a set of default components including the boot loader, the OEM adaptation layer (OAL) and board-specific device drivers. Windows CE is a Microsoft operating system designed to play nice with a range of resource restrained devices.

“In the 'VM' subdirectory, there are sample files to use to help you boot a VirtualPC. This includes a sample floppy disk image with an ethernet bootloader on it (VPC_BootCE.VFD), and a sample VM that you can add to the VirtualPC menu if you want. The HD0_Sample virtual hard disk file provided is a blank automatically-expanding 32MB VHD. It has not been partitioned or formatted. It is there to avoid a warning from VirtualPC that you are booting a PC without a hard disk,” reads the documentation shipping with the release.

Windows Embedded CE 6.0 Virtual PC 2007 Binary BSP is available for download here.