Texas Instruments Embedding Linux

darthcamaro writes "Looks like pretty soon Linux will truly become ubiquitous thanks to Texas Instruments new DaVinci System on a chip DSP. The new consumer electronics chip aimed at capturing the Digital Video market is powered by MontaVista Linux. 'TI understands that there is a larger number of Linux programmers than there are DSP programmers,' Huy Pham, DSP System-on-Chip product marketing manager at TI, told internetnews.com. 'What [DaVinci] does in partnership with MontaVista is enables the Linux developer to use the DSP without needing to understand the complexity of programming the DSP.'"

Comments

free software is expensive.

[nblender]

MontaVista isn't going to get anywhere if they continue to insist on charging $18,000 USD a seat for 'gcc'. An embedded project I'm on comes with a Montavista runtime license. When I asked for the kernel source, the hardware vendor said they were legally bound by MontaVista not to give out the kernel source and to talk to MV. When I asked MV for the source, the salesperson tried to tell me that required a special source license that I had to pay for. I think someone in 'sales' doesn't understand the concept of a license. We've since chosen to just dump MV. I think TI would probably be better off just coming up with their own distro.

Blackfin?

[GregAllen]

Analog Devices makes a family of DSP called the Blackfin that runs uClinux. We've been using a development board for well over a year. If this is TI's first linux offering, I'd say they're late to the party. Maybe it was hard to port Linux because sizeof(char) was 2. (If you've ever used a 16-bit TI DSP... :)