Number-two telecom real-time operating system (RTOS) provider Enea Embedded Technology has partnered with embedded tools specialist Metrowerks on a complete development environment and OS package for telecom equipment designers wishing to combine Linux with Enea's proprietary RTOSes. The package includes Linux and tools from Metrowerks, which will provide second-line support.

Enea ranks second behind Wind River as a supplier of real-time operating systems (RTOSes) for telecom, according to VP of Marketing Adrian Leufvén. It nets $80 million annually, divided equally between products and services.

“This relationship [with Metrowerks]. . . allow[s] Enea to be a Linux provider,” said Leufvén.

Linux demand

According to Leufvén, Enea customers ask for Linux because of its excellence hosting high-level telecom and datacom applications and management services. Yet, he says, Carrier Grade Linux does not yet provide sufficient real-time, fault tolerance, nor high availability features needed for data-plane use. “This new solution is the first that lets OEMs enjoy the application-level benefits of Linux in a multi-processor, multi-blade environment without compromising real-time responsiveness and availability.”

Leufvén says that Enea's combined Linux/RTOS package is ahead of Linux products from competitor Wind River, which last fall began marketing Linux tools. Wind River announced in February a partnership with Red Hat to develop and market embedded Linux.

Enea's combined Linux/RTOS development package is based on Metrowerks CodeWarrior, an IDE (integrated development environment) that has long supported Linux. Metrowerks added support last fall for OSE, Enea's proprietary RTOS for telecom and datacom.

Leufvén says that support for both Linux and OSE in the same development environment enables developers to postpone decisions about which system components will run which OS, leading to design flexibility.

OSE and OSEck

According to Enea, OSE is a memory-protected RTOS optimized for high-availability, high-reliability distributed communications systems. OSE uses the host processor's hardware memory management facilities to prevent kernel and application processes from corrupting each other. It includes TCP/IP and other networking/security protocols, and supports dynamically downloading new applications into running systems.

OSEck (OSE Compact Kernel) is a minimal OSE implementation for DSPs (digital signal processors) such as those that digitize cell phone conversations. OSEck is fully pre-emptive, occupies less than 4KB of memory in a minimal configuration, and is fully event driven, according to Enea. OSEck uses the same API and message-based communications framework as OSE, enabling application processing to be distributed across multiple processors.

Gateway and Database

The Enea tool suite includes Linux/OSE Gateway, software designed to enable close integration between Linux and OSE or OSEck. OSE Gateway is a Linux port of similar software that OSE has long provided for Solaris and other Unix platforms, according to Leufvén.

The development package also incorporates the Polyhedra database, a secure, fault-tolerant data repository for embedded systems applications. Polyhedra is an active relational database management system (RDBMS) with a small code footprint and a memory-resident design.

Enea, with Polyhedra, was listed among third-tier embedded database providers in a 2003 survey report from analyst firm VDC.

Metrowerks tools

The Enea development suite includes several Metrowerks tools and embedded Linux packages that support PowerQUICC and other processors from Motorola spin-off Freescale. The Metrowerks tools include:

• CodeWarrior IDE. Provides RTOS-aware, source-level debugging, code coverage, hardware evaluation, kernel adaptation, project management, and board bring-up capabilities for Linux and OSE operating systems, on both PowerPC and Starcore (Freescale DSP) architectures, according to Enea.
• Metrowerks board support packages (BSPs). Intended to run out-of-the-box in hybrid Linux/OSE systems. BSPs include a kernel, device drivers, applications, services, libraries, GNU tools, and a deployment wizard.
• Platform Creation Suite. Can be combined with Metrowerks Linux BSPs (board support packages) to configure a Linux kernel and drivers for a variety of target boards and CPU architectures.
• Target Wizard. Simplifies configuration, building, deploying, and extending complete Linux systems, according to Metrowerks.

Enea Tools

The development suite includes several tools from Enea, including:

• Softkernel. A simulator for OSE and OSEck that enables designers to develop OSE-based applications on Windows or Solaris operating systems in advance of hardware availability
• Illuminator, a system-level analysis and profiling tool that enables programmers to monitor, control, and collect data for applications viewed as a sequence of events (such as context switches and message passing between processes).

Availability

The Linux/OSE development suite is available now under a licensing that Enea describes as “flexible,” permitting developers to populate systems with a variety of processors and operating systems, and reconfigure the architecture during the span of the development process.

 
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