(PR excerpt) — SnapGear Inc. today announced the first free Linux-based integrated development toolchain for Intel XScale. The open source environment brings together an Intel supported port combined with readily available open source tools to provide substantial cost savings to developers who presently must pay thousands of dollars for development tools.

Using the new uClinux distribution, a single click selection will configure the necessary Linux kernel, libraries and applications to build for the IXP425 processor board. Then a single invocation of the make utility will allow the developer to produce a binary image ready to load and run on the IXP425 board. Conventional Linux developers will be familiar with the build process as it is based on standard Linux kernel configuration mechanisms.

Chief Software Wizard at SnapGear, Greg Ungerer, said: “The uClinux distribution and build system already supports a range of full MMU and MMU-less processors. But the addition of the Intel XScale IXP425 processor support is big. We're really knocked out by the XScale technology and excited by the sorts of devices we can now build with it for our customers.”

The Intel XScale (IXP425) processor is an ARM-based RISC core which clocks up to 533MHz with 64k of cache. It is important to embedded product developers because of the degree of component integration which includes an on-chip SDRAM controller, 2 high-speed serial ports, 2 10/100Mbit Ethernet ports, UTOPIA interface for ATM / xDSL, PCI bus, host USB, and even an encryption accelerator.

The new tools are incorporated in a forthcoming release of the uClinux distribution that will be available in February 2003. The distribution will also include support for iAPx86 and Hitachi SuperH cores and will be based upon the Linux 2.4 kernel with glibc-2.2.5, uClibc and more than 150 application packages.

 
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