Research Triangle Park, NC — (press release excerpt) — Red Hat, Inc. today announced an expanded range of new OEM and development board ports for its RedBoot embedded debug and bootstrap solution. By extending the available range of RedBoot compatible platforms, Red Hat aims to help developers and OEMs improve productivity and time-to-market for current and future embedded projects. “Red Hat's embedded tools and service offerings are designed to help embedded developers complete complex projects on time and get them to market efficiently,” said Michael Tiemann, CTO, Red Hat. “We offer the most widely used line of embedded development tools and services on today's market. With the expanded platform compatibility of our RedBoot solution, Red Hat looks to help an even wider range of projects reach market on schedule.”

Since its introduction in September of 2000, RedBoot has seen rapid uptake by the industry, resulting in new architectural and board ports. RedBoot compatible board ports of note include . . .

• Coverage of the entire range of Intel StrongARM developer boards, including being shipped as the standard firmware the new Intel Xscale-based IQ80310 development boards.
  
• ARM Ltd's Evaluator-7T and Integrator evaluation and development boards
  
• EPI and ARM Ltd's Dev7 and Dev9 PID development boards
  
• Cirrus Logic 7209/7211/7212 ARM720-based development boards
  
• Cirrus Logic 9312 ARM920-based development board
  
• Bright Star Engineering's nanoEngine and commEngine SA1110 development board
  
• Compaq's iPAQ SA1110-based PDA – complete with compact flash ethernet, virtual keyboard and linux boot support
  
• Support for MIPS Inc's Atlas and new Malta development board for MIPS32 and MIPS64 family processors
  
• PMC-Sierra MIPS RM7000-based Momentum Computer's Ocelot board
  
• Motorola's PowerPC MBX860 development board
  
• Samsung CalmRISC16 and CalmRISC32 development boards

In addition to new board ports, RedBoot is being deployed in several new OEM products including Intel's planned residential DSL gateway.

RedBoot is a flexible open source embedded debug and bootstrap solution that provides firmware for development and deployment of embedded Linux systems, eCos and GNUPro applications on a wide range of embedded platforms including AM3x, ARM, CalmRISC, MIPS, PowerPC, SHx, Sparc, V850 and x86. For embedded systems, RedBoot functions like a flexible open source BIOS. RedBoot supports remote, portable downloading and debugging of GNUPro and eCos applications, flash and network booting, and downloading and updating of flash images remotely via serial or ethernet connections for field upgradeability. Based on the eCos HAL, RedBoot provides a common environment for booting and debugging applications regardless of the underlying hardware platform, thus providing more opportunities for code reuse and commonality.

Further general information about RedBoot is available here, and complete sources, documentation, and firmware binaries are available here.

 
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.