(PR excerpt) — TimeSys Corporation today announced the release of TimeSys Linux 4.0, a significantly upgraded version of its embedded Linux operating system and development environment. TimeSys Linux 4.0 adds a number of high availability and Carrier Grade Linux capabilities, and updates the TimeSys Linux kernel to the 2.4.18 Linux kernel.

Additionally, TimeSys has broken the price/performance barrier for commercial embedded Linux development packages by offering a full-function embedded Linux SDK at what it calls “desktop-pricing” levels. Developers can now begin embedded development with a full-functionality standard edition TimeSys Linux SDK, Pentium-class (x86) processor version, for just $79.95.

The TimeSys Linux SDKs for Pentium-class processors are complete embedded Linux development environments, including a full Linux distribution with the industry's lowest-latency kernel, GNU tool chains, certified drivers for serial, Ethernet, PCMCI, PCI, PS/2 and USB for keyboard and mouse, EIDE for hard drive, floppy and CDROM, and SVGA devices, along with user and API documentation.

Developers wanting hard real-time performance can purchase an SDK with TimeSys Linux/Real-Time, a royalty-free, single-kernel Linux RTOS, for $795. For the ultimate development environment, TimeSys Profession Edition SDKs include the company's graphical IDE (TimeStorm 2.0) along with an event visualization and tracing tool (TimeTrace), and is priced at $2,995 (standard version) or $4,995 (real-time version).

More about TimeSys Linux 4.0

TimeSys Linux 4.0 updates TimeSys Linux to the 2.4.18 Linux kernel, improving support for wireless devices, providing better memory and process management, and improving driver support and modularity. Additionally, TimeSys Linux 4.0 includes High Availability/Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) features including support for Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), and Ext3 journaling filesystem support to significantly reduce the time spent recovering a filesystem after a system error. Other High-Availability/CGL features of TimeSys Linux 4.0 include . . .

• User-level multi-threaded debugging enabling debugging at the more granular, thread level.
  
• Kernel Debugger (KGDB) for debugging kernel space modules and device drivers.
  
• POSIX message queues providing a standard interface for improving the portability of software code from one operating system to another that uses POSIX message queues.
  
• Hot Swap insert and removal enabling users to significantly minimize downtime and achieve higher availability of their systems by allowing CompactPCI cards (cPCI) to be removed and inserted while the system is running.
  
• Real-time performance to meet soft and hard real-time requirements, including priority inversion avoidance.
  
• System survivability under extreme loads and overload conditions by reserving processor and network protocol resources for critical applications.

TimeSys Linux SDKs, TimeSys' packaged embedded Linux software development kits, will begin shipping with TimeSys Linux 4.0 immediately. TimeSys plans to upgrade its entire catalog of more than 50 complete board-specific SDKs by mid June of this year, with more boards and processors being added regularly.

TimeSys Linux 4.0 Performance

TimeSys Linux 4.0 features significantly enhanced performance within the Linux kernel. TimeSys has enhanced the Linux kernel to specifically meet the needs of embedded systems. Whereas Linux was developed as a general purpose operating system, favoring high throughput over responsiveness, most embedded systems require some level of predictability from the operating system to ensure system performance. The TimeSys Linux kernel is the lowest latency Linux kernel available today. It is fully preemptible, which means that higher priority tasks can always preempt a lower priority task to gain access to the kernel. TimeSys has modified interrupt handlers and SoftIRQ (aka bottom-half) handlers to enable priority scheduling of interrupts, further reducing the latency of higher priority tasks and thus increasing the performance of the Linux kernel. The TimeSys Linux GPL kernel, featured in TimeSys Linux SDKs, is ideally suited to meet a range of performance requirements from high-throughput to soft real-time.

For embedded systems that require hard real-time performance, TimeSys has developed loadable performance modules that transform TimeSys Linux into a true real-time operating system (RTOS). Unlike other Linux approaches to achieving real-time performance, royalty-free TimeSys Linux/Real-Time is capable of response times well under 50 microseconds on a loaded processor and provides features for avoiding priority inversion, a major advantage over other so-called “real-time” Linux distributions that fail to meet the priority inversion avoidance requirement of an RTOS. Only TimeSys provides a true RTOS with all of the features and benefits of Linux in a single Linux kernel.

 
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