Slashdot Mirror

There's also the Nucleus RTOS from Mentor Graphics. Here in New Zealand, it's available in feature phones such as the Mobiwire Dakota, Doro 6520 and the ZTE R350. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

https://www.mentor.com/embedde...

> Except for the multiple paid versions of GCC compilers out there:
> http://www.mentor.com/embedded...

The product you linked to, Codebench lite, is neither proprietary, nor paid.
It's simply NOT a "paid version of GCC compiler", because it's not something you pay for - it's free and you can download the source.

That same company ALSO sells support services and an IDE. They don't sell a compiler.

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

Are you claiming that SNC is a GCC derivative? Citation? The wikipedia article mentions that they ship their compiler, which can be used INSTEAD OF the gcc-dereived compiler provided by the hardware manufacturer.

Although, the Linux-c6x release notes page says "this release uses the gcc tool chain (4.5-124) from Code Sourcery."
The Code Sourcery link says "Mentor Graphics makes extensive enhancements to the base versions, adding support for more CPUs, improving code-generation, and addressing defects found through its validation process."
Maybe their patches got rolled into mainline in version 4.7?

Any reason why you couldn't replace your ATmega with something like this Cortex M0 and have the same cheap DIP setup? With codesourcery lite you also have a compatible gcc version for free

Also did you benchmark the digitalWrite function? I don't really see any reason why digitalwrite won't compile to direct register access.

Well for starter, it has multiple debugging session support in a single window. Multiple toolset support. Multiple transport support. For instance look at a particular IDE for embedded debvices based on eclipse architecture. Nucleus Edge http://www.mentor.com/products/embedded_software/development_tools/ide/index.cfm (and btw I'm talking low level OS development, not high level java or C++ which essentially is simlar to desktop development)

Mentor Graphics offers E-CAD for Linux and high end CAD runs on Linux (e.g. NX). If you're looking for free, I agree - there are no good offerings (at least that I know of). I've never cared much for AutoCAD, but I'm probably biased from working on high-end CAD for too long. I didn't use AutoCAD 3 years ago, either (more like 7), so I'm not sure how usable it was then. I hear they now have parametric modeling now, so that may change my opinion if I ever tried it again.

A lot of animation programs such as Pixar's Renderman run on Linux, but I agree, there is a bit of a dearth of offerings for film editing. For photo editing, Adobe probably didn't find it worth porting to Linux because most users would be satisfied using free competition in Gimp. That may change as film studios adopt Linux for rendering - I've heard Disney has asked for it and are currently running it in WINE.

Hm. There are two issues here and I'm a bit confused regarding which you mean.

My impression is that Open Source does exist to do at least part of this job. I don't know how good it is.

Concidering that there are at least two different Commercial operations that have created a pared down version of linux for use as an embedded os saying that linux is to large to be worth using as an embedded os shows that you are really suffering from bad management decision making.

http://www.pt.com/products/nexusware.html [NexusWare(TM) Linux-Based Software Suite]

http://www.uclinux.org/ [Embedded Linux/Microcontroller Project]

http://www.denx.de/wiki/bin/view/DULG/ELDK [Embedded Linux Development Kit ]

http://www.mentor.com/products/embedded_software/ [ Mentor Graphics site ]

the last one above might actually be of use in your particular case, being embedded graphics applications specialised they may have something for your current device to improve the performance.

If you are using a normal distro on a device with extremely limited resources, then you would naturally have a very unreliable or slow device. If you are using linux on a excellent system, and are doing video compositing / editing work, then it may be that the particular application isn't as effective as it could be.

Cinelerra is an Adobe Premiere type of tool, but it's requirements for hardware are extremely high.
[ I don't have the hardware that can run it..dual opteron 275s with 4 x 1 Gb Registered pc3200 ram and 500 Gb hard drive is minimal ]

It's rue that in the case of Movie and Television needs linux is serioulsly lacking in the software to even support the needs. The options are there, if you have the time to find them, but the number of options is far less than with windows or mac systems.

I saw 3-4x performance gains on Redhat 8.0, Xeon 2.8GHz, 4GB ECC.

3-4x compared to what? That's a simple question... care to answer it?

My server was a nice Altus 130 with dual Athlon 2600MP and 4 Gb of ram, and a nice, EDA vendor supported Red Hat 7.2. Now, I happen to know that the Athlon CPUs tends to get starved since the CPU-Memory bus isn't quick enough to keep it up for some things, like verilog simulations, or on various benchmark reports that you can find at various sites. That's why even my old Sun Blade 1000s with only 600 Mhz CPUs was able to keep up. The Suns have a better memory bus. A P4 with the 800 Mhz bus would do better that the Athlons, and let the greater CPU power show. The 533 Mhz bus wasn't really different that the Athlon.

This was VerilogXL, NCVerilog and Design Compiler.

We run Modelsim and VCS. So? I might believe NCVerilog would be Modelsim, but VCS?

Your FUD doesn't hold water "anonymous coward".

There is FUD flying alright, but its mainly anti-Sun FUD coming from you. Well, that might be a little harsh. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and just assume that you are ignorant and unfamiliar with your vendors plans and supported tools. Since I'm in a charitable mood I'll help you out.

Why don't you try visiting DeepChip? You will find, if you read carefully, that Linux is far from a universal win, although there are many success stories. Unfortunately many of the success stories sound sort of like yours-- "I have a hot, brand new Linux box that beats some sort of old Sun!! Linux RULES!!" If you cast your net wider to check FPGA sites, and various other ones, the story is about the same.

Here is the Cadence SUPPORTED HARDWARE PLATFORMS MATRIX FOR 32 BIT platforms. You will notice that there are large gaps in the Linux support, and that it is for older releases.

There is also a Cadence SUPPORTED HARDWARE PLATFORMS MATRIX FOR 64-BIT APPLICATIONS, but I wouldn't bother looking for any Linux based tools there for at least a year or two, if ever. Even IBM's AIX doesn't fare so well there.

What about Synopsys? Well, their baseline for building EDA tools on X86 Linux is going to be Red Hat 7.2 (the one that is EOLed) for some time to come, and it will only support binary compatible versions. (I will also note that Synopsys has dropped support for various intermediate Red Hat releases on various tools due to problems, so you might find that 7.0 and 7.3 supported, but not 7.1 or 7.3). On the Itanium Synopsys is going to support Red Hat Enterprise (you know, the cheap one - not.) Although why you would buy an Itanium based system and run Red Hat instead of HP/UX is beyond me. HP/UX is far more mature and has a much larger software base than Linux, but I guess some people will run Linux just to run Linux.

What about Mentor Graphics? Their supported platform release history looks a lot like the other two. There are lots of tools that only run on old Linux releases, and gaps in the releases.

As You can read in the Red Hat Network 2.6.0 Release Notes that they have End Of Lifed Red Hat 6.2-7.0. 7.2 should be EOL about now too.

As you can see, almost all EDA tools from the major EDA vendors are only supported on obsolete, unsupported Linux releases. If you put in a little effort, you will find that many of them are moving to run only on the professional versions o

Mentor, the makers of the real time operating system "Nucleus" (tm), would appear to have reasonable grounds for confusion with a product in the same market place "The Real Time Operating system Nucleus Linux" aka TRON-Linux.

http://www.mentor.com/nucleus/

Sure you can argue Nucleus is a general term, but I doubt that argument holds much weight when both names are used in the same market. Heck, these two are even in the same tiny corner of the computer word (realtime operating systems).

Of course, IANAL, much less a trademark specialist. Anyone more educated on the topic care to comment?

I too remember hearing that Mentor Graphics would cost upwards of $1M per seat. <SARCASM>The high price is clearly to compensate for the highly elegant user interface.</SARCASM>

Protel doesn't support Linux, but a few people have claimed to get it running under WINE.

Our company (admittedtly a small one - around 35 people) has done both migrations at the same time and have saved a ton of money in the process.

We are an engineering company, and used to have two computers on every desk - a UNIX workstation (combination of Suns and HPs) for the "real work", and a Windoze PC for things like email and documentation. Now, these have both been replaced by Athlon 2000+ machines running Linux. The main thing we were waiting for was the UNIX EDA software (from Mentor Graphics) to be ported to Linux. We now use mainly OpenOffice for documentation and Evolution/Kmail (depending on personal preference) for email.

The combination of ditching the expensive workstation hardware and the MS Office software has made the basic platform really cheap. The main cost, however, is still the EDA software, but even that is coming down. The added side benefit is less computer clutter and much simpler system administration.

Most mechanical/aerospace and electrical/computer design firms are heavily rooted in UNIX. I work for a semiconductor design and technology firm and all our EDA (electronic design automation) tools not only run on UNIX, but 75% of them either don't have Windows ports or are "crippled" on Windows (because of issues with multiuser, remote display, etc...).

About half of those tools now have full, native ports on Linux. Specifically you ask? Try Synopsys, Mentor Graphics, ModelTech, etc... Although Sun just came out with a powerful new UltraSPARC III chip (powerful from an FPU, and therefore engineering, standpoint against x86), Linux gives you much more "bang for the buck" on single/dual processor x86 hardware than SPARC.

Furthermore, many of the preceding companies have been touting the price vs. performance ratio of Linux clusters versus traditional shared memory Sun systems (in favor of Linux, of course ;-) and have modified their Linux ports just for such implementations.

-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith