Embedded Linux Development Made Accessible to the Masses by MontaVista

April 4, 2007; 05:37 AM
MontaVista Software, Inc. today announced the release of MontaVista Application Developer Kit (ADK) 5.0, a major update of its widely-used application development solution, making it the most easy to use embedded Linux development platform available. ADK 5.0 delivers a set of intuitive, interactive, and essential plug-ins for Eclipse, the industry leading open source Integrated Development Environment (IDE), which streamlines and automates embedded Linux development. The release also includes powerful analysis tools and virtual targets that vastly improve developer productivity to meet customer requirements and deliver more features within shortened development cycles.

“Creating and optimizing applications for embedded Linux environments used to be a cumbersome and difficult process for many application developers,” said Jim Ready, CTO and co-founder of MontaVista Software. “What’s been missing in the industry are new enhancements to development tools, including tighter integration with open-source Eclipse plug-ins, graphical user interfaces that make Linux application development uncomplicated and straightforward to nearly any application developer.”

MontaVista ADK 5.0 has been thoroughly enhanced and redesigned to reduce the complexity of embedded Linux application development and analysis so this larger class of application developers can be more productive. With ADK 5.0, application developers do not have to deal with the complexities of selecting, integrating and configuring the thousands of Linux development components. ADK 5.0 includes a suite of advanced analysis tools that help developers identify how system resources are being used, how applications and processes are affecting the system, and which are taking up too much system memory and affecting overall device performance. Now development teams can focus on building more features that differentiate their product, on time.

“Today’s Linux developers need a flexible, feature-rich platform to accelerate time-to-market and control costs throughout the design lifecycle,” said Steve Balacco, Director, Embedded Software Practice, Venture Development Corporation. “Comprehensive solutions such as MontaVista’s ADK 5.0 are expected to offer increasing efficiency to the Linux-based development process and enable the development of new generations of innovative applications.”

DevRocket 5.0, the IDE component of ADK 5.0, is available for the first time, as a set of pure Eclipse plug-ins, allowing developers to access all development tools from one interface. “MontaVista is doing Eclipse right. By offering their DevRocket 5.0 IDE as a set of compatible plug-ins, their user will fully benefit from the vast Eclipse ecosystem,” said Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director, Eclipse Foundation, Inc.

ADK 5.0 also includes a comprehensive Linux virtual target, a powerful solution designed to reduce development time and costs. Virtual targets and cross tools allow developers to create their applications in a virtual environment emulating the hardware of the finished product. As this is done concurrently to hardware development, organizations no longer need to wait for the finished hardware before creating their applications, increasing time-to-market. The included virtual targets and cross tools, provide a complete environment that allows application developers to build projects on MontaVista Linux from day one though production.

ADK 5.0 is currently available for purchase. Additional features that help streamline and automate embedded Linux development include:

• MontaVista Linux (MVL) Edition Management: Discovers any MVL 3.x, 4.x, and 5.x installation and provides build and debug access to those installed toolchains and LSPs. Includes MVL Pro 5.0 glibc and uClibc toolchains and one cross-architecture toolchain.
• MontaVista Target Management: Uses standard SSH connection to provide Eclipse Remote Systems Explorer (RSE) services on MVL targets; allows users to perform target file system management, process management, and console services on any MVL target; automates debug and analysis tasks on any MVL target.
• C/C++ Developer Toolkit (CDT) Extensions for Managed Make: Utilizes standard CDT Makefile format for building and debugging remote applications; enables access to debug/release build profiles; builds applications, static libraries, and shared libraries; includes standard Make support for kernel builds.
• Dynamic Tool Chain Selection: Allows users to access and easily switch between any discovered toolchain within any MVL project; provides access to the local GCC tool chain within any MVL project.
• Memory Debugging: Automates and configures MPatrol to find memory leaks; intuitive graphical user interface enables users to quickly discover the source of memory leaks.
• Performance Analysis: Automates and configures OProfile for statistical profiling of system and/or applications; easy-to-use graphical user interface enables users to quickly discover the source of performance bottlenecks.
• Memory Usage Analysis: Provides an overview of total available system memory and provides a graph of relative usage by the kernel, all applications, and free memory; provides highly detailed information about the kernel to show memory used by buffers, cached pages, code, slab allocator, date, page tables, and vmalloc; drills down into applications to show a detailed memory map and which percentage of each section is resident.
• Virtual Target Platform (ADK only): Provides a complete, bootable MVL Pro 5.0 virtual environment; allows boot of custom file systems; provides all tools and configuration required for advanced debugging and analysis.
• Trace Analysis (PDK only): Provides an intuitive graphical user interface through the TimeDoctor Eclipse plug-in to load and display LTTng trace files to easily understand and troubleshoot all system events.
• Platform Image Builder (PDK only): Enables quick selections of available MVL or user packages; enables replacement of kernel and user packages with custom versions; performs dependency resolution and conflict analysis to ensure selection of required packages; supports creation of separate image for different mount points; writes to a wide range of target file systems.

About MontaVista Software

MontaVista Software is the leading provider of Linux for intelligent devices and telecommunications infrastructure. MontaVista delivers a commercial-quality Linux operating system, easy-to-use development tools, expert support, design and migration services and a complete ecosystem of more than 400 partners. Headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif., MontaVista has operations in 15 countries. For more information, please visit www.mvista.com.

Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. MontaVista is a registered trademark of MontaVista Software Inc. All other names mentioned are trademarks, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.