MontaVista has announced support for Freescale's latest mobile multimedia system-on-chip (SoC). MontaVista says that its Professional Edition (Pro) embedded Linux distribution supports the i.MX21 today, with Consumer Electronics Edition (CEE) support expected later this year. The i.MX21 targets smart mobile devices such as smartphones, portable media players, PDAs, and mobile gaming devices.

According to MontaVista, the i.MX21 offers better video and graphics capabilities than previous Freescale SoCs for smartphones, such as the Dragonball i.MX1 and i.MXL. The ARM926EJ-S-based chip also features “Smart Speed” power management technology, integrated security features, plug-and-play connectivity, and a wide array of integrated peripherals designed to reduce system chip counts and power requirements. More details on the i.MX21 SoC are available here.

MontaVista says its Pro 3.1 now supports more than 30 processors across eight architectures, and is among the most widely deployed embedded Linux platforms.

MontaVista says its CEE 3.1 was specifically designed for resource-constrained consumer electronics applications such as mobile phones, digital televisions, set-top boxes, and automotive telematics. CEE enhances Linux with dynamic power management, support for direct execution from flash memory, consumer-grade reliability, and system analysis tools for performance tuning, according to the company.

Much technology developed and/or adapted by MontaVista for CEE is also available in CELF Linux, a distribution for CE devices being developed collaboratively by Asian consumer electronics giants and embedded Linux houses such as MontaVista and others. Both CEE and CELF Linux are based on Linux 2.4.20.

Both versions of MontaVista Linux are supplied with DevRocket, an IDE (integrated development environment) based on Eclipse. DevRocket supports hosting on Linux, Windows, and Solaris, and supports a wide range of development, testing, and verification tools, including RTI's ScopeTools.

MontaVista competitor Metrowerks, a Freescale subsidiary, also announced i.MX21 support with a Linux distribution based on CELF Linux. Freescale announced a “Jazz” reference board for portable media devices based on the i.MX21 on July 1.

Mobile phone giant Motorola earlier used MontaVista Linux in its A-768 smartphone, and may be considering the platform for the E680 smartphone/mobile media player expected to launch in 2004.

 
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.