Green Hills And LynuxWorks Vie For RTOS Lead

By Bernard Cole
iApplianceWeb
(03/10/02, 01:41:41 PM EDT)

San Francisco, Ca. --- Using the venue of the Embedded Systems Conference where the focus of many technical representations is on tool and OS issues related to netcentric computing and communications, Green Hills Software and Lynuxworks unveiled major new enhancements to their proprietary operating systems focused on network support.

Integrity Enhances Distributed Support

The focus of the newest Version 4.0 Integrity OS from Green Hills Software, Inc. (Santa Barbara, Ca.), is major enhancements to its kernel and major advancements in I/O, networking, and multitasking/multiprocessor debugging as well as support for most of the processors important in netcentric computing and communications, including the PowerPC, ARM, MIPS, and Xscale processors. It features a worst-case interrupt latency of less than 200 nsec, and worst-case context switching of less than a microsecond.

According to John Carbonne, vice president of marketing, Version 4.0 provides a number of kernel awareness enhancements that make it much easier for the company's MULTI source-level debugger to monitor and debug system behavior at the task and even address space level. Key features important in the distributed computing environment include support for debugging across multiple address spaces, each task in its own debug window.

Its graphical resource analyzer has improved visibility into applications and the kernel as they execute on the target system, displaying CPU execution at the task and address space level, stack usage for tasks, and memory use for address spaces. The host-based analyzer displays this information as a line graph, providing a historical view of CPU time and memory use. The data is collected by a target-based agent that occupies just 2.5 kbytes of memory. The agent incurs no overhead until it connects to the analyzer GUI.

An enhanced real-time event analyzer (EventAnalyzer) allows programmers to log and monitor system and application events in real time without disrupting program execution. Operating like a high-level logic analyzer, the EventAnalyzer displays all context switches, API calls, and interrupts in a time-relative manner using intuitive icons.

A new debug agent has been incorporated into the operating to allow the company's MULTI debugger to communicate with multiple programs running on targets in a VMEbus or CompactPCI system, via single Ethernet connection. For more information, go to www.ghs.com

Lynuxworks Bulks Up Its Proprietary RTOS

The focus of Lynuxworks recently on its family of Linux operating system products for embedded iAppliance and real time applications lulled many of its competitors into believing it was abandoning or gearing down support for its proprietary, but highly Posix-compatible RTOS. The company's announcements at the Embedded Systems Conference should put an end to such illusions.

Squarely positioned to set a new industry benchmark for performance and openness, LynxOS 4.0, said Inder Singh, CEO of LynuxWorks (San Jose, Ca.) adds an array of new enhancements that have been designed to attract customers away from using similar products offered by Green Hills, as well as Wind River, QNX, and other off-the-shelf or in-house proprietary operating systems.

Most important, he said, for its use in high performance segments of the network core, significant improvements in the LynxOS 4.0 task response has been improved over the previous release by over 30 percent. "It exhibits true linear scalability, remaining deterministic regardless of the number of tasks performed at any point," said Singh.

The company has also incorporated significant support into the LynxOS 4.0 kernel for such a variety of features that will be necessary in future networking applications, including support in the kernel, rather than in the external API IPSec, IPv6 and an integrated firewall. The TCP/IP stack has been enhanced for reentrancy, determinism and performance, and includes the latest protocols for networking and routing, such as OSPFv2, BGP-4 and RIPv2.

According to Singh, tests with small packets where 100BaseT wire speed is not a limiting factor showed performance increases by more than 90 percent over the previous LynxOS release. "This is due to enhancements we've made to the new stack for better throughput and drivers optimized for speed,” said Singh. Gigabit Ethernet support is also provided with performance at up to 93% of wire speed. For more information, go to www.lynuxworks.com