Sunnyvale, CA — (press release excerpt) — MontaVista Software Inc. today announced that GET Engineering Corp., a manufacturer of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) Navy Tactical Data Systems (NTDS) products that are deployed in tactical applications of all classes of U.S. Naval and NATO vessels, has successfully converted to the Hard Hat Linux operating environment, porting from a proprietary RTOS platform to embedded Linux. GET Engineering produces interface adaptors and associated products including parallel and serial adaptors for PMC, ISA, PCI, VME, and CompactPCI based systems. GET's customers include major defense and aerospace contractors such as Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems.

“MontaVista¹s solution was cost effective and its technical support was excellent,” said Robert Ruhe, chief executive officer of GET Engineering. “The transition was as smooth as silk and the resulting real-time response is more than adequate.”

Real-time performance from embedded operating systems is critical in military and aerospace applications. GET¹s real-time performance target for a critical timing sequence in the embedded switch product was one millisecond. Actual test results using Hard Hat Linux were significantly faster at 680 nanoseconds. Time-to-market requirements are also important in the competitive military aerospace market. GET Engineering planned on a six-months-to-one-year development cycle to move from its proprietary RTOS to embedded Linux. With MontaVista¹s proprietary RTOS to Hard Hat Linux transition kit, 90 percent of the APIs translated easily with no changes or additional work, and the project was completed in only two months. The product was immediately placed into GET¹s customer service test site where it is successfully undergoing rigorous tests.

MontaVista's hard real-time, fully preemptible kernel technology advances Linux to the responsiveness attributed to proprietary kernel products. It does so while still providing all the benefits of open source, including rapid development and deployment based on a royalty-free model. The Hard Hat Linux preemptible kernel improves real-time application response from hundreds of milliseconds (worst case) to less than one millisecond. MontaVista¹s legacy RTOS-to-Linux transition kits streamline the porting of legacy code to embedded Linux. With the MontaVista tools, developers can reap the benefits of moving to a full-featured, open-source platform without the massive engineering burden usually associated with such a move.

 
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.