Arabella has released a Linux 2.6 distribution for Freescale PowerQUICC communications processors that it says achieves exceptionally fast IPsec performance using a customized version of the 2.6 kernel's native IPsec stack. Arabella Secure Linux for PowerQUICC targets access devices and other secure networking equipment.

According to Arabella, the Native IPsec stack in Linux kernels 2.6 or newer provides a complete, standard implementation of the IPsec protocol suite. It says it has optimized the stack for embedded applications, and integrated it with custom device drivers for Freescale security processors, producing an inexpensive IPsec stack that performs better than expensive, proprietary IPsec stacks.

Arabella CEO Jonathan Masel says his team worked for months to identify and mitigate bottlenecks in the freely available Linux Native IPsec, when run on Freescale security processors. “Arabella has benchmarked throughput of an IPsec application on a 400MHz MPC8272 processor (which has an on-chip encryption engine) at over 22,000 packets per second. This makes Arabella's version of Native IPsec the highest performing version available today. By comparison, standard Native IPsec off-the-net runs the same applications on the same processor at close to 2,000 packets per second,” said Masel.

Arabella says its Secure Linux includes optimized device drivers for “nearly all” PowerQUICC I and PowerQUICC II peripherals. Drivers include Ethernet, UART, ATM, USB (host and device), PCI, I2C, SPI, and PCMCIA. The distribution supports NAT (network address translation), firewalling, and SSH (secure shell).

“Many of our customers are building their embedded software applications on top of the Linux operating system,” said Mike Shoemake, PowerQUICC marketing manager for Freescale.

Availability

Arabella Secure Linux is available immediately on PowerQUICC I and PowerQUICC II secure communications processors. It will be available for PowerQUICC III in the first quarter of 2005.

Arabella delivers Secure Linux as full source code under a GPL license. It also offers engineering services, and can configure and optimize the distribution for proprietary hardware, it says.

 
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