MontaVista Software says their newly released Carrier Grade Edition 3.0, unveiled today at LinuxWorld in New York, is the first product that fully complies with the Carrier Grade Linux spec released last year by the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL).

MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition (CGE) version 3.0 is an upgrade to the company's specialized Linux offering for the telecom equipment market, which was launched last year with a designation of version 2.1. CGE supports telecom equipment manufacturers (TEMS), Network Equipment Providers (NEPs), telecom carriers, and related service providers.

The OSDL Carrier Grade Linux Specification 1.1 includes standards such as the Linux Standards Base (LSB), IPv6 (including IPSECv6 and MIPv6), SNMP support, and POSIX interfaces for timers, signals, message queues, semaphores, event logging, and threads.

Glenn Seiler, MontaVista director of product marketing, said “CGE 3.0 . . . delivers a true, OSDL-compliant carrier-grade product, unlike distributions that just provide patches to a generic server product.” The product “was designed and comprehensively tested, from the ground up, to address telecom availability needs and OSDL feature requirements, [and includes] significant [MontaVista] contributions to Open Source in the area of high availability including the OpenIPMI project and our CompactPCI Hot Swap subsystem.”

Seiler describes CGE 3.0 as an open architecture enhancement to standard Linux with additional high reliability and availability features carrier-grade environments, incorporating standard interfaces that provide greater flexibility and portability. Key features are said to include . . .

• Platform support for hot swap, remote boot, disk-less, and console-less operation.
• High availability features including driver hardening, watchdog timer support, Ethernet redundancy and aggregation, RAID 1 support, journaling file system support, and disk and volume management support.
• Features to meet serviceability requirements such as resource monitoring, kernel crash dump and analysis features, structured kernel messages, dynamic kernel probing, hardware error logging, and remote access to the event log.
• Targeted development and deployment tools including debugger support for threaded programs, kernel debugger support, and a kernel crash dump analysis tool, the MontaVista Field Safe Application Debugger and Runtime Application Patcher.
• MontaVista Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) driver implementing a full-featured IPMI driver and message handler in the kernel. The driver provides the application programmer a complete and easy-to-use interface to IPMI. (Note: MontaVista will use the IPMI driver and libraries to support the Service Availability Forum (SA Forum) Hardware Platform Interface API, later this year.)
• Performance down to millisecond real-time (less than 5 ms worst case latencies), preemptible kernel, RAID 0 (striping), application pre-loading, and a scaling analysis and report to identify scaling bottlenecks.

CGE 3.0 supports multiple hardware solutions based on CompactPCI and volume based rackmount servers, including systems from leading telecommunications platform hardware suppliers such as Force, IBM, Intel, Motorola, and RadiSys.

 
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