Open Source Featured Article

Wind River has announced the availability of Wind River (News - Alert) Linux 3.0, a pre-integrated, commercial-grade and fully supported Linux platform.

Wind River Linux 3.0 is based on Linux kernel 2.6.27 and GCC 4.3, and is company’s most feature-rich Linux platform to date. According to company officials, it provides “flexible” and “pervasive” development environment.

The latest version is equipped with more than 500 software packages, 250 more than the previous product version, including packages for multimedia, graphics and human-machine interface (HMI) technologies, such as X.org, GTK+, GNOME or GStreamer.

Wind River Linux 3.0 provides a set of pre-configured system profiles for vertical industries including the aerospace and defense, consumer, industrial, networking and medical market segments.

Previously, Wind River’s Linux distributions were individually packaged to contain different features and hardware support for each specific vertical market. Company has now condensed these stand-alone vertical distributions into a single consolidated platform.

Officials said that this has enabled Wind River Linux 3.0 to provide existing and new customers with reduced purchasing complexity and increased development flexibility.

Additionally, the new release also offers multicore features such as virtualization based on kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) and multicore offload. Officials said that this allows customers to utilize the potential of modern multicore hardware.

“Open source software platforms are becoming an industry standard among device manufacturers trying to drive innovation while controlling cost,” said Nithya Ruff, senior director of product management and marketing for Linux Product Division at Wind River.

He said that the company offers an advanced Linux platform, adding that more than 15,000 man hours of testing and 500,000 test cases specifically for Wind River Linux 3.0 ensures commercial-grade product quality.

Wind River Linux 3.0 complies with the Carrier Grade Linux 4.0 specification from the Linux Foundation, which is considered to be a critical requirement for the telecommunications and high-end data networking markets.

Wind River Linux 3.0 supports a broad range of hardware platforms including the newest addition, Sun Microsystems’ (News - Alert) UltraSPARC T2 architecture.

This Week, Sun Microsystems announced that Wind River has completed the port of Wind River Linux 3.0 and Workbench development suite to Sun's chip multi-threaded (CMT) UltraSPARC T2 processor.