Motorola subsidiary Metrowerks has released a board support package (BSP) for running Linux on Moto's pending PowerQUICC III, a line of next-generation communication processors now sampling in alpha quantities and targeting Q4, 2003 availability. The BSP is optimized for use with Metrowerks' Platform Creation Suite (PCS), and is designed to help developers rapidly deploy solutions on the… reference platform, according to Metrowerks.

Metrowerks calls PCS “a tools framework supporting each step of an embedded product's development cycle.” PCS is used to download Metrowerks' freely available BSPs, which bring along target-specific base components such as a kernel, GNU debugger and tool-chain, runtime environment, device drivers, and libraries. PCS then manages Linux OS configuration, build, extension, and deployment tasks for the hardware target, according to Metrowerks.

Motorola's PowerQUICC III processors feature a system-on-chip (SoC) architecture supporting industry standards and advanced Motorola technologies. Key features include a high-performance Book E PowerPC e500 processor core, a 256KB on-chip L2 cache memory array, an enhanced Communications Processor Module (CPM), RapidIO interconnect technology, dual Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, and support for Double Data Rate SDRAM (DDR SDRAM) and PCI/PCI-X.

According to Berardino Baratta, vice president, Linux Solutions Group for Metrowerks, “No-cost, off-the-shelf development resources that work with world-class processors are key to establishing critical mass for embedded Linux.”

 
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