MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition 5.0 is a commercial-grade Linux development platform for developers working with RAS (reliability, availability, and serviceability) managed hardware (HPI, IPMI) or custom hardware, who require long-term support and high availability.
Carrier Grade Edition 5.0 provides the time-to-market benefits normally only found in proprietary development platforms with the customizability and control of an open source Linux environment.
The heart of MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition 5.0 is an embedded Linux operating system designed for telecom and network equipment, including ATCA- and MicroTCA-based platforms, such as SGSNs, GGSNs, and softswitches. Because Carrier Grade Edition 5.0 supports Linux standards, designers can add functionality by including off-the-shelf Linux utilities without worrying about function loss due to incompatibility.
MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition 5.0 includes features only available from MontaVista, including new field-serviceability features that give field engineers the ability to fix and upgrade live systems while they are running with little or zero downtime. Unlike non-commercialized open source code, MontaVista Linux CGE is a field-proven production-quality operating system, has been integrated, tested, and debugged by MontaVista's testing facilities, and is supported by MontaVista's experienced support organization.
New Carrier Grade Edition 5.0 also includes a development environment that enables engineers to more quickly design new equipment and applications. MontaVista Linux CGE provides reliability, scalability, and real-time performance proven in the field by major voice and data carriers.
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A complete development platform | |
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Run-Time Application Patcher |
Available only from MontaVista, the Run-Time Application Patcher gives field engineers the ability to apply a binary patch to a live system while it runs, without incurring any downtime. Engineers can update software, fix bugs, and add new features to a live system without stopping it or rebooting. |
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Flight Recorder |
When a system fails today, field engineers must wait until the next failure to investigate the first one. Engineers have no way of gathering enough data about what happened before and during a crash to conduct an effective post-crash diagnosis and take corrective action. CGE 5.0 includes new Flight Recorder, which acts like an airplane black box to track and log system history. It keeps a scheduler history, which provides more information than a crash dump snapshot, and is user-extensible for customized tracking. |
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Field-Safe Application Debugger
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When issues arise in a live carrier grade system, bringing the system offline for debugging is not acceptable. MontaVista Field-Safe Application Debugger debugs a live system without halting execution or affecting services. A field engineer logs into a live system, uses the debugger to set tracepoints, and logs out. The debugger collects execution information and stores it for later retrieval. The debugger's small memory footprint and limited CPU usage have minimal impact on the live system, providing debugging without obstruction, and enabling critical processes to remain online and running to provide the high availability that carriers require. This capability, available only from MontaVista, has been enhanced and is easier to use. |
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Live application core dump
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When field engineers need to perform a core dump to help them debug problems on a running application, MontaVista's live application core dump dramatically reduces the downtime required to make a core dump. With only a short (generally tens to hundreds of milliseconds) stop of the application, this new feature takes a snapshot of the running application. The application can continue running while engineers debug the snapshot to fix the application. MontaVista is the first to offer this capability. |
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Transparent Inter-Process Communication (TIPC)
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Designed for clustered computer environments, the TIPC cluster communications protocol allows designers to create applications that can communicate quickly and reliably with other applications regardless of their location within a cluster. Using TIPC, a process can send messages to a service without having to know the location of the service; so the service location can move. TIPC also provides a basic membership handling to know which nodes are and are not available in the cluster. |
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Integrated real-time response
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Carrier Grade Edition 5.0 is 100% native Linux with real-time performance features, including MontaVista enhancements plus integrated high resolution nanosecond timers (hrtimers) Additional real-time features include fast mutexes, threaded soft and hard IRQ handlers, and application-level priority inheritance and queuing, providing preemption response latency as low as 50 microseconds. Benchmark tests have proven that MontaVista's integrations of real-time features deliver much lower latency levels than non-MontaVista implementations. |
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Microstate accounting
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For the first time in a commercial Linux product, engineers can accurately measure process and thread utilization on a CPU. CGE 5.0 performs high-resolution process accounting, so applications can be monitored to anticipate and prevent CPU overload situations. This enables engineers to design automated load balancing and graceful protocol degradation using reliable and accurate CPU load numbers. Engineers can accurately monitor and precisely predict CPU loads, increasing the accuracy of worst-case planning, preventing downtime, and reducing the purchase of backup equipment for traffic surges. Older systems report CPU and thread activities based on statistical sampling estimates, which can be very inaccurate, instead of the actual measurement now enabled by microstate accounting. Microstate accounting in CGE 5.0 will improve the scalability, reliability, and cost of carrier networks. |
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Integrated development environment
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Carrier Grade Edition 5.0 includes new runtime components that integrate with MontaVista DevRocket, an Eclipse-based IDE with development tools that enhance productivity for both kernel-level and application-level engineers. Integrated memory leak detection, performance profiling, memory usage analysis, and system tracing combine to accelerate system development and maintenance, and increase system availability. |
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Multicore and SMP support
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Carrier Grade Edition 5.0 supports both single-core and multicore processors, and supports equipment built with multiple processing chips as well as synchronous and asynchronous multiprocessing on integrated chips. |
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Carrier standards compliance
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MontaVista Linux CGE 5.0 is compliant with Carrier Grade Linux Specification 4.0 from the Linux Foundation as well as LSB 3.0 compliant. CGE 5.0 is also compliant with the SCOPE Alliance Linux Profile, and runs on hardware designed to support the PICMG Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA) and MicroTCA specifications. CGE 5.0 supports Intel's Extensible Firmware Initiative (EFI). |
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MontaVista's carrier grade partners
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Oracle, MySQL, Enea, VirtualLogix, and more than 70 additional MontaVista partners provide middleware, applications, and tools ready to use in carrier grade network equipment with MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition. |
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