Lineo has announced that the uClinux project team has successfully ported uClinux to the European Space Agency (ESA) open source SPARC core and has implemented a working uClinux/FPGA system on a Xilinx field programmable gate array (FPGA). The open source OS + open source SPARC combo will be demonstrated publicly for the first time today, at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose, CA. According to Brian Sparks, Lineo's CEO, this accomplishment represents an industry first. “We don't know of anyone else who's done this,” said Sparks at a Lineo press conference called to announce this plus several other technical, business, and product news announcements.

Jeff Dionne, VP of R&D at Lineo, says that in the process of creating the port, the uClinux development team obtained and modified the source to the ESA SPARC core, known as “Leon SPARC V8”, which is released under the LGPL license. “We had to make some changes to the core in order to get it to run on the Xilinx Virtex FPGA reference design board made by Xess.” Dionne added that Lineo plans to develop their own reference board for the uClinux/FPGA port, that will used to assist companies developing embedded Linux applications incorporating uClinux within FPGAs.

According to Dionne, source for the uClinux FPGA port will be available for developers to download “as soon as it's cleaned up for initial release,” which should be within several weeks. uClinux is released under GPL, so the new FPGA port of uClinux will also be available under the GPL license.

Sparks emphasized that the new uClinux FPGA support is, at this point, “a technology demonstration — not a product”. However, he explained that Lineo has strong intentions of moving the technology to full production worthiness quickly, as it is an essential component of Lineo's strategy to bring Linux and, in particular, Lineo Embedix into the myriad of resource-constrained applications where uClinux as an optimal open source solution.

uClinux, a port of the Linux kernel to microcontroller-like processors, supports CPUs both with and without memory management units. uClinux has lately seen rapidly growing acceptance in consumer appliances such as the Aplio Internet phone, the Axis Internet camera, and the Adomo home information system, and is also the basis of Red Hat's NET+LX embedded Linux support.

 
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