The Register®

Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/18/montavista_arm11_linux/

MontaVista's new ARM11 Linux goodies

Big (endian) deal

By Rik Myslewski in San Francisco

Posted in PCs & Chips, 18th December 2008 19:54 GMT

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Even if you're a seasoned ARMy brat, you're to be forgiven for having seen MontaVista Software's (http://www.mvista.com/) recent announcement (http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20081215005804&newsLang=en) that it was offering Linux support for the ARM1176JZ-S and ARM1176JZF-S (http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/ARM1176.html), and asking "So what?"

After all, ARM announced (http://www.arm.com/news/3791.html) those two cores (the JZF-S with an integrated floating-point processor) way back on October 13, 2003. Hardly hot-off-the-fab news.

MontaVista logo

Also, there have been a number of Linux implementations for the ARM11 cores. For example, TimeSys began (http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS3527558253.html) providing Linux support for Freescale's ARM11-based i.MX31 in May 2006, companies such as Mistral Solutions (http://www.arm.com/iqonline/news/marketnews/18460.html) and Bug Labs (http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/01/first-pics-of-bug-labs-open-source-hardware/) have offered ARM11 dev kits running Linux since 2007, and DENX released (http://www.denx.de/en/News/WebHome#NewsEldk42Arm) its Embedded Linux Development Kit 4.2 for ARM11 this November.

To uncover what's the new what (http://whatsthenewwhat.blogspot.com/) in MontaVista's latest offering, we talked with the company's director of product management, Patrick MacCartee. He said the recent offering from MontaVista is more than a mere distro, but a complete IDE (integrated development environment) that features "Glibc (http://sourceware.org/glibc/) and uClibc (http://www.uclibc.org/) (also known as micro libc) support," thus providing mobile-device developers with the "small library footprint" they desire for custom SoC environments.

Of equal importance, said MacCartee, is that MontaVista is the "only Linux commercialization partner that provides big-endian support (http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid7_gci211659,00.html#)" for ARM11, a capability important to such ARM partners as Texas Instruments. MacCartee also claimed that the "fully debugged commercial quality" of the MontaVisa IDE and distro can "help product-development companies shorten their development time by weeks or months."

We're not in a position to either verify or refute MacCartee's claims just yet, but we do think they go a long way to answering the question, "So what?"