Enea plans to market a small-footprint TCP/IP stack add-on for OSEck, its compact RTOS (real-time operating system) for DSPs (digital signal processors). The “DSPNet” stack should enable DSP farms running OSEck to connect via gigabit Ethernet to heterogenous, distributed systems running Linux and other OSes, according to the company.

OSEck is a compact version of Enea's OSE RTOS, optimized for DSPs. Like OSE, OSEck (OSE “compact kernel”) supports Enea's Linx IPC (interprocess communications protocol) stack, which aims to “simplify the design, deployment and management of complex wireless applications spanning multiple DSPs,” the company says.

Linx is also available for Linux — Enea released a Linux port of Linx under an open source license in March of 2003. Thus, OSEck's newly available TCP/IP stack should enable Linux systems to communicate with DSP farms running OSEck over standard TCP/IP networks based on commodity parts.

The DSPNet stack for OSEck can be configured with a memory footprint under 40KB, Enea says. The stack can support IPv4, IPv6, or both. It is said to have a high-performance, zero-copy API based on BSD sockets, and it also supports raw IP/UDP/TCP BSD sockets.

OSEck itself can be configured with a footprint as small as 8KB, Enea claims. Claimed context switching times are 150 nsec, while worst-case interrupt latency is said to be 300 nsec (assuming 850-MHz clock frequency).

Karl-Gustav Niska, VP of product management, stated, “As DSPs are used in more complex networked environments, TCP/IP is becoming an integral part of the total DSP solution, particularly when Gigabit Ethernet is used as the local interconnect for DSP farms. Offering a TCP/IP stack for OSEck is another important step in executing our strategy to deliver complete platform solutions.”

Availability

DSPNet will initially be available for OSEck running on TI's C64x DSP family and Freescale's Starcore family, at prices starting at $5,000. Projected availability dates were not disclosed.

Additionally, Enea plans to offer a “broad range” of security and networking applications for OSEck that exploit the DSPNet stack, it says.

 
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.