Q: "What are Board support packages?" -- BSP A: If an OS comes only as binary executables, or as an object library, the vendor must either provide a version built to run on your exact hardware, or provide the routines to handle hardware specific functions and interface with the more generic binary code. They often call this target specific code a "Board Support Package", and if none is available for your board, you either change boards or wait for the BSP to be done. With a source code OS, the situation is much different. With every port, we provide the source code to the target-specific low level routines. In almost every case, (including our embedded x86 port) these have been built and run on at least one actual target board. We refer to that as a "run-time package" for that particular board. If you want to use a different board, you alte r these files to match your particular peripheral set and memory mapping, an d move on. We generally do not attempt to initialize and provide a driver for every peripheral device on a board (or on a highly integrated chip). We do enough to get our demonstration program running, which requires, at a minimum, that a timer be initialized to provide a periodic interrupt. This must be captured and serviced by Nucleus PLUS in order to provide the system timer. In a couple of rare cases, we have provided for more complete support of the peripherals on a particular target board. We refer to this additional perip heral support as a "board support package". As you can see, with us, "board support package" refers to something that, while admittedly a convenience, is by no means necessary in order to use Nucleus PLUS on a particular target board. Practically all of the many customers who have used PLUS have done so without "board support packages" from us. Many of those customers have used boards for which even a "run-time package" was not available