MontaVista Introduces MontaVista Linux 6

             MontaVista Software has announced MONTAVISTA LINUX 6, which the company claims is a revolutionary new approach to embedded Linux development. By delivering Market Specific Distributions, combined with the new MontaVista Integration Platform, MontaVista gives commercial device developers flexibility to design and deliver products uniquely tailored for their target market.

                                                

             MontaVista Linux 6 provides a complete embedded Linux development environment comprised of Market Specific Distributions, development tools, and the support and maintenance required by developers to fully leverage the semiconductor Linux technology and resources from the open source community. This approach to embedded Linux fully aligns the embedded Linux supply chain for the first time. Embedded device developers maintain the quality, control and consistency they require to deliver commercial-ready devices to market faster while having the flexibility to tailor their design to the specific application requirements.

            “In the current market, customers are often forced to make a difficult decision on which Linux technology to start a project with: open source, their semiconductor partner’s Linux technology, or a commercial distribution. That decision always involves making compromises and can be difficult to move away from once development has begun,” said Jim Ready, CTO and founder, MontaVista. 

             “With the release of MontaVista Linux 6, we are taking a huge step forward in aligning the Linux supply chain, giving our customers the flexibility to start quickly, maximise their hardware investment and harness the full power of Linux and the open source community. Our customers no longer have to settle or compromise.”

               MontaVista Linux 6 is comprised of: Market Specific Distributions, MontaVista integration platform, MontaVista Zone Content Server and MontaVista DevRocket 6.

               Market Specific Distributions (MSD) are new Linux distributions, built on a common framework, and optimised for the respective hardware platform and its target market. An MSD is designed to support the full breadth of functionality provided by the semiconductor vendor, be feature compatible with the semiconductor vendors’ Linux technology and provide the value-add features and quality MontaVista is known for. Fully supported by MontaVista, MSD’s may be customised and optimised for the target application, allowing developers to easily create a tailored software distribution that fully exploits the hardware specific features.

              The MontaVista Integration Platform is built on open source technology and allows developers to easily extend and customise their software stack, while maintaining control over the build process With the Integration Platform developers can fetch and integrate code from other team members, outside vendors, or the broader open source community. Since it’s built on open source technology, the Integration Platform supports the standard recipe file formats used throughout the open source community. This flexibility in a commercial solution enables developers to easily customise their software stacks at all levels -- the kernel, device drivers, libraries and applications. Systems developers can consistently build all target-installed software from source – with just one command – and create multiple, reproducible build configurations or perform incremental builds as required.

               The MontaVista Zone Content Server delivers source code and other content to the Integration Platform, freeing the developer from the constant task of searching for new source code and updates. The developer can identify changes, updates and dependencies in his code via the Integration Platform, with the option of incorporating these changes to his build environment.

               MontaVista DevRocket 6 – the newest release of the MontaVista Eclipse-based IDE for platform and application development. DevRocket supports the new MontaVista Integration Platform, and MemTraq memory analysis, along with industry-standard tools for debugging, development and system profiling.

               MontaVista Linux 6 is in use by beta customers today and will be generally available in July 2009.

NVIDIA Submits OpenCL 1.0 Driver For Conformance Certification

                                                

                                 NVIDIA said its OpenCL 1.0 drivers for Windows XP and LINUX have been submitted to the Khronos OpenCL Working Group for certification immediately after the conformance tests were approved. These pre-release drivers are now available to all NVIDIA GPU Computing registered developers

"NVIDIA was the first to provide pre-release drivers to its OpenCL Early Access Program participants in April 2009. NVIDIA remains the only vendor today with software and hardware available for developers to program with OpenCL as well as other GPU Computing environments including DirectX Compute, C with CUDA extensions and other languages," explaines NVIDIA.                               NVIDIA's OpenCL 1.0 drivers will support all GPUs based on the CUDA architecture.               OpenCL is a trademark of Apple Inc. used by permission by The Khronos Group.

                                         

                                    

NVIDIA Releases CUDA Toolkit 2.2

                             

                       NVIDIA has released version 2.2 of the CUDA Toolkit and SDK for GPU computing. The release includes support for Windows 7, the upcoming OS from Microsoft that embraces GPU computing. CUDA Toolkit 2.2 features Visual Profiler, improved OpenGL Interop, Zero-copy, Hardware Debugger for the GPU, etc.

                                   

                      The CUDA Visual Profiler is a graphical tool that enables the profiling of C applications running on the GPU. This latest release of the CUDA Visual Profiler includes metrics for memory transactions, giving developers visibility into one of the most important areas they can tune to get better performance. CUDA Toolkit 2.2 delivers improved performance for medical imaging and other OpenGL applications running on Quadro GPUs when computing with CUDA and rendering OpenGL graphics functions are performed on different GPUs. The release also delivers up to 2x bandwidth savings for video processing applications.

                     Enables streaming media, video transcoding, image processing and signal processing applications to realise performance improvements by allowing CUDA functions to read and write directly from pinned system memory. This reduces the frequency and amount of data copied back and forth between GPU and CPU memory. Supported on MCP7x and GT200 and later GPUs. 

                     Developers can now use a hardware level debugger on CUDA-enabled GPUs that offers the simplicity of the popular open-source GDB debugger yet enables a developer to easily debug a programme that is running 1000s of threads on the GPU, claimed the company. This CUDA GDB debugger for Linux has all the features required to debug directly on the GPU, including the ability to set breakpoints, watch variables, inspect state, etc.

                     This system configuration option allows an application to get exclusive use of a GPU, guaranteeing that 100 per cent of the processing power and memory of the GPU will be dedicated to that application. Multiple applications can still be run concurrently on the system, but only one application can make use of each GPU at a time. This configuration is particularly useful on Tesla cluster systems where large applications may require dedicated use of one or more GPUs on each node of a Linux cluster, said the company.

Android To See 900 Per Cent Growth In 2009

Android is expanding from a low base and is consequently outgrowing the iPhone OS from Apple.
Global Android smartphone shipments will grow 900 per cent in 2009, according to the latest research from Strategy Analytics. Healthy support from operators, vendors and developers is driving adoption. Apple iPhone OS will be the next fastest-growing smartphone operating system in 2009, with a 79 per cent growth rate.
Android is a software platform for mobile devices, powered by the Linux kernel, initially developed by Google and later the Open Handset Alliance -- a multinational alliance of technology and mobile industry leaders. It includes 48 hardware, software and telecom companies devoted to advancing open standards for mobile devices.

The HTC Dream (also marketed as T-Mobile G1, Era G1 in Poland) was the first phone to the market that uses the Android platform. T-Mobile is now looking to launch multiple Android-based devices in the second half of this year with three partners.

Tom Kang, senior analyst, Strategy Analytics, said, "We forecast global Android smartphone shipments to grow an impressive 900 per cent annually during 2009. The Android mobile operating system from Google gained early traction in the United States in the second half of 2008, and it is gradually spreading its presence into Europe and Asia during 2009. Android is expanding from a low base, and it is consequently outgrowing the iPhone OS from Apple, which we estimate will grow at a relatively lower 79 per cent annually in 2009."

Added Neil Mawston, director, Strategy Analytics, "Android has fast been winning healthy support amongst operators, vendors and developers. A relatively low-cost licencing model, its semi-open-source structure and Google's support for cloud services have encouraged companies such as HTC, Motorola, Samsung, T Mobile, Vodafone and others to support the Android operating system. Android is now in a good position to become a top-tier player in smartphones over the next two to three years."

Samsung Electronics recently unveiled the I7500 -- its first Android-powered mobile phone. Motorola is also working on hardware products that would run Android. Sony Ericsson is planning to release an Android based handset in the summer of 2009. Acer is rumored to be releasing phones called the L1, C1, E1, F1 and A1 (unconfirmed) late in 2009.

Firefox To Get Multi-Process Support!

Firefox, the world's second most used browser, by the looks of it will soon receive an update. Mozilla's developers have announced plans to add application multithreading to Firefox, a feature already partially enabled in its main rivals -- IE8 and Google Chrome. The enhancement would allow the software to take advantage of multicore microprocessors to boost responsiveness and also improve browser stability. According to Techtree.com, while little is known about the project itself, we have a roadmap which suggests that we should be seeing a simple implementation of this in action by July this year.

Firefox, the world's second most used browser, by the looks of it will soon receive an update that will add multi-process support.

By multi-process support we re talking about the similar feature seen in Google Chrome and IE8 that runs multiple, separate processes for each tab, which allows the browser to function without issues even when one tab has stopped responding or has crashed. This method of splitting processes increases stability and offers performance improvements as well.

As for why the speculation regarding multiprocessor support arose, that is because of a recent project that the Mozilla has initiated. The project is being co-coordinated by Benjamin Smedberg, who is a long time supporter of Mozilla. While little is known abut the project itself, we have a roadmap which suggests that we should be seeing a simple implementation of this in action by July this year.

That being the first phase, there will be three other phases post this, which will deal with the interactions between process types. The third phase will comprehensively test APIs for extensibility, accessibility, and performance. The fourth phase will deal with the final implementation and sandboxing.

Looking at how things are moving now, it would be at least an year from now when we would see a final release version of Firefox with multi process support.

Intel, Novell Team to Push Moblin Mobile Linux Platform

Intel and Novell have announced plans to extend their existing collaboration around the Moblin open-source Linux mobile Linux platform.

The two companies signed an agreement outlining their plans for collaboration, including efforts to promote the adoption of Moblin among original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and original design manufacturers (ODMs). Moblin is an optimized Linux platform for delivering rich Internet experiences on Intel Atom processor-based netbooks and other mobile systems.

Indeed, Novell announced it will create a Moblin-based product for netbooks that it will push to OEMs and ODMs. Novell also said it will establish Novell Open Labs in Taiwan to foster the adoption of Moblin and will work with the Taiwan Moblin Enabling Center (MEC), a joint effort of Intel and the Taiwan Institute for Information Industry, to validate designs for Moblin compliance.

Intel launched Moblin in 2007 and incubated the effort until last month when the Linux Foundation became host of the community. Intel continues to contribute key technologies and work with the developer community to advance the effort. Novell began contributing to the Moblin project last October.

Novell joined the Moblin effort in late 2008. Doug Fisher, vice president of Intel’s Software and Services Group and general manager of the company's System Software Division, said, “The combination of Intel Atom processor-based platforms and Moblin-based Novell software will provide even more opportunities for OEMs, ODMs and the broader Moblin community to deliver excellent mobile Internet solutions.”

Novell’s contributions to the Moblin ecosystem include leading the open-source development of key operating system features such as window, e-mail and media management.

“We are extending our involvement with Moblin because we believe that it provides a richer mobile Internet experience,” said Ron Hovsepian, Novell president and CEO, in a statement. “The emergence of such mobile computing platforms as netbooks presents a significant growth opportunity. We believe that Moblin-based Novell software on Intel-based platforms will offer OEMs and ODMs exceptional solutions for delivering a full Internet experience on such devices.”

Wind River Announces Partner Validation Program With Initial Partners

Wind River has announced the Wind River Partner Validation Program with initial partners 6WIND, Continuous Computing, GoAhead Software, Oracle, RADVISION, and Tail-f Systems. Partners in the programme will provide validated solutions based on Wind River's operating systems (VxWorks and Wind River Linux) and partner technologies critical to telecom and networking equipment providers, including embedded databases, high availability middleware, networking protocols and management software.

Wind River and its partners will focus on providing pre-integrated platform solutions for infrastructure equipment being developed for broadband wireless, wireline and enterprise networks. These growth segments include 3G, Long Term Evolution (LTE), Femtocell Gateway, WiMax, Metro Ethernet, IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) and enterprise data.

Wind River's software partners will validate the software components and provide testing and commercial support to customers. The primary benefits of such pre-validated solutions are that customers can reduce development, integration, and quality assurance efforts and thereby reduce overall risk while accelerating time-to-market, according to the company.

"Wind River's Partner Validation Program directly addresses the increasingly important business issues of time-to-market and R&D cost savings among our customers," said Mike Langlois, general manager, networking and telecom industry, Wind River. "As part of our efforts to define and enable the networking industry's software reference platforms, Wind River has hand selected industry leading commercial software companies in critical component spaces to create a preferred strategic relationship with Wind River. This is significant because now our customers can spend significantly less time and effort integrating software components to create a carrier-grade product."