Enea OSE Real-Time Operating System Adds Multicore SMP Support for Freescale MPC8641D and MPC8572DS Processors
Stockholm, Sweden and Tokyo, Japan, Multicore Expo – November 6, 2008 – Enea® (Nordic Exchange/Small Cap/ENEA), a world-leading provider of network software and services, today announced version 5.4 of the Enea OSE's real-time operating system. OSE version 5.4 adds symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) support for multicore CPUs, beginning with Freescale's PowerPC-based MPC8641D and MPC8572DS processors. Other key features include a new demand pager that supports dynamic load modules, and an enhanced IP stack with IPv6 support. The new demand pager will substantially reduce the BOM cost for applications as low-cost NAND flash memory can be used instead of expensive RAM.
Enea will describe its vision for multicore processing in a presentation titled "How to Combine Bare-Metal Performance with SMP Ease of Use in a Multicore RTOS" at the Multicore Expo in Tokyo, Japan on November 7.
"The majority of communications processors will be multicore processors by 2012," said Terry Pearson, vice president of marketing at Enea. "To help network equipment providers take full advantage of these high-performance processors in both the control and user plane, Enea is taking a two-pronged approach. First, to deliver an immediate performance boost with minimal impact on legacy applications, we are providing traditional SMP support. Meanwhile, we are working on a more advanced multicore architecture known as FlexMP that combines the performance and compatibility of SMP with the flexibility and real-time responsiveness of asymmetric multiprocessing."
OSE is a modular, high-performance, full-featured real-time operating system optimized for complex distributed systems requiring the utmost in availability and reliability. OSE's pre-emptive real-time response, memory protection, supervision, error handling, and run-time program loading make it ideal for building fault-tolerant distributed systems that offer true deterministic real-time behavior with five nines or higher availability.
OSE employs a high-level message-passing programming model that makes complex applications easier to conceptualize, model, partition, and debug. It also provides transparency that separates applications from the details of the underlying hardware and physical topology, making the resulting code more portable and scalable. Enea's LINX interprocess communications (IPC) services extend the benefits of message passing to OSE applications distributed across multiple processors and operating systems.