MontaVista, Inc. has announced a pSOS-to-Linux rescue mission, in the form of a transition kit that facilitates the porting of pSOS applications to Linux. The effort follows the recent announcement by embedded RTOS leader Wind River of a plan to transition its pSOS customers to VxWorks and phase out pSOS support. (Wind River completed its acquisition of pSOS developer Integrated Systems Inc. in February, 2000 — see press release. pSOS and VxWorks are real-time operating systems for embedded system applications.)

The pSOS-to-Linux transition kit is being made available as an open source project, based at www.psos2linux.org. MontaVista expects the kit's functionality and coverage to grow with participation from the existing pSOS user base. An early access distribution is available NOW via ftp, here.

Jim Ready, MontaVista Founder/CEO, said “while the WindRiver acquisition of Integrated Systems does represent an important consolidation in a fragmented RTOS marketplace, it forces an unpleasant choice upon thousands of ISI customers — to follow a circuitous and nebulous path from pSOS to VxWorks, or to look elsewhere for an embedded software platform. Developers with existing pSOS code are essentially stranded.”

The MontaVista pSOS toolkit supports the execution of existing applications within a single secure Linux process, with pSOS tasks running as Linux threads. When used together with the MontaVista real-time scheduler, a system can implement the original RTOS real-time prioritization in an embedded Linux environment, with comparable to superior performance and throughput.

To use their legacy code, developers recompile their applications, linking with the MontaVista pSOS virtual machine libraries. Execution in the Hard Hat Linux environment supports key RTOS APIs and services, and can form the basis for an actual deployed system or act as a proof-of-concept prior to a full port to native Linux execution. Note: the support is currently limited to X86 and PowerPC CPUs.

MontaVista plans to add comparable VxWorks functionality in early Q3 2000. (Editor: www.vxworks2linux.org … ?)

 
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