Date: 08/11/2008

Enea's OSE RTOS to support Freescale's multi-core MPC8641D and MPC8572DS

Enea has announced version 5.4 of the Enea OSE 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.

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.