Research Triangle Park, NC; Waltham, MA — (press release) — Red Hat and NetSilicon have announced a partnership to deliver open source products and services that accelerate time-to-market for manufacturers of Ethernet and Internet-attached devices. Under the terms of the agreement, Red Hat will provide engineering services to NetSilicon and ongoing support to NetSilicon customers. The first product from this partnership is NET+Lx, a development platform for Internet Appliances running uClinux, which was ported by Red Hat to NetSilicon 's NET+ARM processor. The product will be on display in the Red Hat booth (#1038) at the Embedded Systems Conference next week.

Cornelius “Pete” Peterson, president and CEO of NetSilicon, said “the next wave of computing is happening at the device level. With the availability of tightly-coupled software and silicon solutions, the intelligent device market will soon dwarf the desktop and server markets in annual units shipped.” The partnership brings together the resources and strengths of two trusted leaders in embedded technology. NetSilicon's NET+ARM processor has been developed specifically for embedded networking applications and is used by more than 250 customers worldwide. Peterson continued, “Combining the strengths of Red Hat in open source, GNU, Linux, real-time, and worldwide support with the proven NET+ARM family of networked microprocessors provides our mutual customers with an out-of-the-box environment to rapidly develop Internet-attached devices.”

“The NetSilicon solution is solid proof of Red Hat's engineering expertise in the areas of open source and embedded systems,” said Michael Tiemann, chief technical officer, Red Hat, Inc. “As embedded devices become more ubiquitous, it is exactly this kind of prowess and creativity combined with the unique benefits of open source software that will drive the next generation of computing.”

uClinux is a version of the Linux operating system that runs on processors with no MMU (memory management unit). It supports a variety of open source applications including webservers, mail clients and ftp clients. uClinux also supports the EL/IX applications programming interface (API). This provides for quick and easy porting of POSIX compliant applications to NET+Lx software and NET+ARM hardware.

“NET+Lx has lived up to its promise. In under three hours, we installed the development tools and had our first program compiled and running on the NetSilicon development board,” said Stefan Steuerwald of SpheronVR, a beta user of NET+Lx. “We are very impressed with the product's stability and performance. We couldn't get the system to crash.”

 
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