San Francisco, CA; Embedded Systems Conference — (press release excerpt) — MontaVista Software Inc. today announced the submission of its hot swap infrastructure code to the Open Source Community. MontaVista is releasing the hot swap code as a project on Source Forge with two goals: to encourage a wide adoption of the base software, and… to promote the development of the infrastructure for fault-resilience and high availability.

The PICMG (PCI Industrial Manufacturers Group) 2.12 software interface specification describes the process for installing and removing CompactPCI boards into and from a running system. The specification includes the concept of a hot swap infrastructure, a body of software that interfaces with the underlying operating system to support hot swap. In particular, the software infrastructure in PICMG 2.12 supports the discovery, configuration, and management of hot swapped system resources. The implementation that MontaVista is placing into Open Source builds on the Linux 2.4 kernel, and includes platform drivers for the Ziatech ZT5550 hot swap redundant system slot board and the Motorola Computer Group 82xx high availability platforms.

"By placing this technology into Open Source, we invite our open software peers to join forces with us and with industry-leading hardware vendors to implement PICMG standard technology on the broadest possible platform base," commented Kevin Morgan, MontaVista vice president of engineering. "Opening this project on SourceForge is a call to action to all interested parties to bring this key high availability technology rapidly into the marketplace and out into deployed systems."

In keeping with MontaVista and Open Source practices, all pertinent work is submitted back to the relevant source trees promoting the architecture and specification for the entire community. MontaVista and others are promoting PICMG 2.12 and related standards for the above-mentioned platforms and other carrier class hardware from Motorola Computer Group, Ziatech, Force Computers, Radisys, and others. Acceptance of standards like PICMG 2.12 will enhance the infrastructure mix needed by communications equipment manufacturers to build central office switching equipment, ISP/ASP platforms, and other networking applications, giving them and integrators more design options to speed OEM communications solutions to market.

High Availability (HA) is a term for technology that enhances the "up-time" of computer systems by distributing functionality across multiple CPUs. In response to hardware and software failures, HA systems facilitate the rapid transfer of control (fail-over) from a faulty CPU, peripheral, or software component to a functional one, while preserving operations or transactions in-progress at the time of failure. Many embedded designers choose the standard CompactPCI board and system form factor for HA designs since it supports hot swap (replacement and insertion) of system and peripheral cards without the need for cycling power, reducing technician-assisted time-to-repair.

Interested parties can examine and download the project code from SourceForge, here.

 
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