Sunnyvale, CA — (press release excerpt) — MontaVista Software announced that it has publicly demonstrated the first working version of embedded Linux targeting the Intel XScale microarchitecture. The demo, which took place at the recently-concluded LinuxWorld and Expo in New York, highlighted Hard Hat Linux booting from flash memory and supporting standard Linux features such as networking and command… shells in a diskless system with minimum memory resources.

MontaVista is making additional investments in optimizing Linux and associated tools to take advantage of XScale-specific architectural features. XScale application developers will benefit from such enhancements which include performance tuning, reduced memory footprint and device interfaces. In keeping with MontaVista and Open Source practices, all such work will be submitted back to the StrongARM/XScale source trees promoting the architecture for the entire community.

Intel Corp. unveiled the XScale platform in August 2000 to carry the successful StrongARM technology base into the handheld/wireless marketplace. XScale is a powerful processor in a cost-effective, power efficient integration, targeted at applications in mobile telephony, personal connectivity, handheld PCs, wireless video, and network infrastructure devices like routers and switches. Unique to XScale is its ability to ratchet its power consumption up and down to suit different computing loads and conserve battery life on handheld devices.

 
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