PowerPC ATCA blade gains Carrier Grade Linux support

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Jun. 01, 2005

Wind River is offering its Carrier Grade Linux OS, tools, and middleware for an ATCA telecom blade computer from Artesyn Communication Products. Wind River's Platform for Network Equipment, Linux Edition now supports Artesyn's KatanaQp, a dual-PowerPC system targeting control plane and packet processing network infrastructure equipment.

(Click for larger view of Artesyn KatanaQp)

The KatanaQp

"Katana" means "sword" in Japanese -- an apt name for a computing blade compliant with the AdvancedTCA standard. Artesyn says the KatanaQp's high-speed PowerPC processors, switched fabric ATCA interface, flexible mezzanine expansion, and integrated system management make it easy to configure for a wide variety of control and packet processing applications, including WAN access, SS7/SIGTRAN signaling, media gateways, traffic processing, wireless base stations and softswitches.

The KatanaQp features up to two 1.4-GHz PowerPC MPC7447A processors, 64 KB of L1 instruction/data cache, one MB of L2 cache, two GB of SDRAM, 64 MB of flash memory, and built-in support for symmetric multiprocessing. The KatanaQp also features four PTMC mezzanine expansion sites, which provide industry standard PCI-X control and CTbus (Computer Telephony Bus) data interfaces to external modules.

KatanaQp architecture diagram
(Click to enlarge)
The KatanaQp's high-speed PICMG 3.1-compliant ATCA fabric interface utilizes a 24-port Ethernet switch and 10 Gigabit Ethernet channels to provide high-speed control and data plane connections. The KatanaQp also features a redundant PICMG 3.0 Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI), which makes it easy for shelf management controllers to monitor, control, and exchange management with the KatanaQp.

Platform for Network Equipment, Linux Edition

Wind River announced the Linux version of its Platform for Network Equipment (PNE) in November of last year, and began shipping a pre-release version of more than 1,000 developer seats in February, it said. PNE was the first of Wind River's Platforms to become available under Linux, and the company announced earlier this month that number two and three telecom equipment makers RadiSys and Artesyn had adopted the product as their preferred (though not exclusive) Carrier Grade Linux platform. Wind River competitor MontaVista announced a similar relationship with top telecom equipment maker Motorola two weeks ago.

Wind River's "Platforms" comprise an operating system, integrated middleware and applications, as well as its Eclipse-based Workbench development tools. The company says the Linux Edition of PNE provides a pre-emptive Linux 2.6 kernel with high-resolution timers, fast user-space mutexes, and a native POSIX thread library. The distribution offers Carrier Grade Linux 2 (CGL 2) extensions that include an Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI), Hardware Platform Interface (HPI), heartbeat monitor, hot-plug, and Ethernet link aggregation failover. Networking support includes IPv4/IPv6, SNMP management, and a suite of open source networking protocols and applications that includes DHCP, FTP, HTTP, NFSv4, NTP, PPP, SCTP, Telnet, VLAN, SSL, SSH, and IPsec, according to Wind River.

PNE for the KatanaQp includes Wind River's Workbench toolsuite, which comprises a "state-of-the-art" GNU GCC cross-tool-chain, Linux cross-build system, and root file system creation tools. The Eclipse-based kernel and package configuration tools include an enhanced project and project build system, editor, source code analyzer, debugger, target manager, and On-Chip-Debug (JTAG) plug-in, Wind River says.

Artesyn's VP of marketing, Todd Wynia, said, "We are seeing tremendous interest in embedded Linux as a platform for building high-availability network infrastructure products. Wind River has taken [the] lead in combining carrier-grade Linux with an easy-to-use development environment."

Availability

The KatanaQp, equipped with a single MPC7447A processor and a four-channel Gigabit Ethernet fabric interface, sells in OEM quantities starting at $3,498. Platform for Network Equipment is available directly from Wind River.

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