uCommon is a new project consisting of what will be a series of somewhat related free software packages that are being developed primarily for use as network services for tiny footprint embedded Linux kernel based systems. These packages will be licensed under the GNU Public License (GPL) and many will be telephony related. All these packages will use the new “uCommon” library, from which the project name is derived. The uCommon project website is located at www.voxilla.org/ucommon.

The uCommon library itself fills in some gaps found in libc (or embedded tiny libc's like uC-libc), and adds some convenience functions for developing embedded C applications. As a static library, uCommon offers consistent functions to simplify the writing of daemons, network socket services, config file parsing, and serial I/O based applications. Other libraries will also be developed as part of this project, including “uScript,” a small memory footprint and pure “C” version of “ccscript,” and a small RTP stack.

While uCommon based packages will be usable on any standard GNU/Linux distribution, these packages are being developed primarily for use in appliance and tiny distributions like the Linux Router Project (LRP), for very small embedded Linux kernel driven system-on-chip ICs like ETRAX, or for single chip based systems like uC-SIMM, many of which use specialized and tiny versions of libc, modified kernels, and other specialized build tools. Many of these packages are being designed to fill some interesting and specific holes in free telephony, and will commonly be deployed in turnkey embedded products.

The current uCommon library and make system is available in CVS and will be released shortly. The first “package” or service to appear from this project will be a new version of my original dbs_server. A new mailing list will also become available shortly. Any comments and suggestions for this project may be addressed to [email protected].

 
This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.