SYSGO Combines Reliable Hard Real-Time and Embedded Linux

Mainz/Germany, October 25, 2006

SYSGO, the European vendor of reliable device software, today announced the release of ELinOS Real-Time, SYSGO´s Industrial Grade hard real-time Linux solution. ELinOS Real-Time combines the feature richness of Embedded Linux with the safety and hard real-time capabilities of SYSGO´s PikeOS, a separation microkernel based RTOS. ELinOS Real-Time is another milestone in SYSGO´s long-term strategy to provide off the shelf products for the embedded industry.

"Missing hard real-time capabilities as well as safety issues always used to limit the adoption of Linux in certain embedded applications. With ELinOS Real-Time, we enable customers to overcome that limitation and deploy Embedded Linux even in hard real-time and safety critical environments", says Detlev Schaadt, CTO of SYSGO.

ELinOS Real-Time is built on SYSGO´s separation microkernel-based real-time operating system for safety and mission critical systems, PikeOS. The incorporated Embedded Linux resides in a dedicated partition (address space and I/O protected area) on top of the microkernel, thus in user space. To implement real-time tasks, ELinOS Real-Time offers a PSE51 POSIX profile (single process, multi-threaded). Each POSIX task resides also in its own dedicated partition, so Linux is not able to interfere with the execution of a real-time application. During the guided configuration process, the user defines, which partition will have access to which I/O device, what kind of inter-partition communication channels should be available and how many. The user can choose between shared memory or FiFo´s to exchange data between POSIX and Linux or between one POSIX task and another.

To gain even greater benefits from Linux running side by side with real-time applications, a POSIX application is able to access the Linux file system as well as the Linux network stack by default.

ELinOS Real-Time extends the graphical ELinOS configuration editor ELK to handle all related real-time parameters and guide customers to start immediately without any additional knowledge. The configuration editor incorporates a set of examples giving easy access to ELinOS Real-Time techniques like inter-partition communication, Linux file system usage from POSIX or POSIX driver enablement. The ELK is used to define the Linux services and applications to be used as well as to configure the memory assignments, the I/O access and priorities for each partition. After each configuration change, the editor performs an integrity check to validate the configuration.

CODEO, SYSGO´s integrated development environment, already incorporates COGNITO, the embedded target analyzer tool. CODEO therefore enables ELinOS Real-Time customers to analyze their Embedded Linux and POSIX application´s timing behavior and take a close look to the target resource information. This includes memory utilization, IRQ behavior, process tree, available sockets, etc. Furthermore, the user is able to develop embedded applications with a comprehensive development environment designed to meet embedded developers´ needs. This includes the capability of debugging POSIX real-time tasks independently.

SYSGO already provides various extensions for ELinOS Real-Time including POSIX IPv4/IPv6 TCP/IP stack, real-time Java or Ada runtime environment and even a VxWorks library.