Ever since Cygnus proposed EL/IX in the Fall of 1999, few companies — other than Red Hat, which acquired Cygnus late last year — have committed to supporting the would-be embedded OS standard. Many Embedded Linux companies have privately speculated that Red Hat's primary motivation for promoting href=”/AT8926600504.html” target=”_blank”>EL/IX as a Linux application program interface (API) has really been to create the opportunity for applications to migrate from Linux to eCos (“Red Hat's other open source OS”) which, like EL/IX, Red Hat inherited through its acquisition of Cygnus.

Today, in one of the few public endorsements to date of EL/IX, system-on-chip (SoC) maker NetSilicon announced its intentions to incorporate EL/IX into its embedded Linux support during the coming year. Not surprisingly, an additional dimension of NetSilicon's 2001 software plan is to add support for Red Hat's eCos OS.

According to NetSilicon CEO, Cornelius “Pete” Peterson, supporting open source operating systems on the NetSilicon SoC processors is an important priority. “Since NET+Lx began shipping in October, we signed on more than 30 customers who are beginning new development projects,” says Peterson. “The market acceptance of NET+Lx has clearly demonstrated the value of open source solutions in the intelligent, networked device market. We believe that open source products will be important for a large portion of the market, and NetSilicon is committed to creating more open source product options and alternatives available to the OEM design engineer.”

 
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