MontaVista Software has established open source community projects for several key technologies used in the design of Linux-based consumer electronics devices. The company says it hopes the contributions will become part of standard Linux and will foster the evolution of Linux as a platform for digital consumer electronics devices.

The open source contributions — and their SourceForge locations — include:

• Dynamic Power Management (DPM) to extend battery life and reduce power consumption
• High Resolution POSIX Timers to enhance real-time performance
• Variable Scheduling Timeouts (VST) to extend the stand-by time of battery powered devices, such as mobile phones
• Protected RAM File System (PRAMFS) to protect data from errant writes

Additionally, MontaVista says it plans to contribute Prioritized Work Queues (PWQ) technology, to enable prioritization and configurability of driver code for enhanced responsiveness.

Previous MontaVista contributions to Open Source include the preemptible Linux kernel and enhanced real-time scheduling, which have become standard features in the 2.6 Linux kernel. More about MontaVista's kernel contributions can be found on Robert Love's page at kernel.org. MontaVista has also been a frequent contributor to the CPU architecture projects for PowerPC, MIPS, and ARM architectures.

“MontaVista Software invites our open standards and open source community peers to join forces with us and with industry-leading hardware vendors to implement standard technology on the broadest possible platform base,” commented Kevin Morgan, vice president of Engineering, MontaVista Software. “Opening these projects is a call to action.”

MontaVista says the functionality represented by the code submissions either is currently or will soon be incorporated in MontaVista Linux Consumer Electronics Edition (CEE). CEE is based on the 2.4.20 Linux kernel, and incorporates DPM, support for XIP (eXecute In Place) of the kernel and applications, streaming media optimizations, the O(1) real-time scheduler, and new MontaVista System Measurement Tools for tuning system performance, timing, and memory size. It also bundles power-management-enabled driver support for peripherals including digital cameras, IrDA, MMC cards, and USB, according to MontaVista.

Interested parties are invited to examine and download code. A new white paper from MontaVista that reviews the key technologies and tools required to build next-generation advanced consumer electronics applications is available for download (with registration).

 
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.