MontaVista Software has announced that the MontaVista Bare Metal Engine pushes their Carrier Grade Edition 6.0 Linux performance to new frontiers. MontaVista Bare Metal Engine delivers the technologies required for next generation multi-core SoC's to achieve extremely high performance, leverage new multi-core resource management capabilities to fully maximize multi-core designs, and delivers new high availability features incorporating the latest open source technologies. According to the latest Cisco Visual Networking Index, mobile data traffic is expected to grow by 39 fold between 2009 and 2014, so wireless systems will be required to operate as efficiently as possible to keep up with the astronomical growth. Now wireless equipment providers building 3G, WiMAX and LTE infrastructure equipment such as LTE Base Stations (eNodeBs) and Evolved Packet Core (EPC) devices, 3G Base stations, Cell Site Aggregators, Radio Network Controllers (RNC), Packet Data Serving Node (PDSN), xGSNs, Femtocells, Femto Gateways, WiMax base stations and ASN Gateways will be able to achieve even higher performance from their deployed applications.

Visitors to this year's Mobile World Congress can witness the performance LEAP the MontaVista's Bare Metal Engine delivers, begging the question "Why use an RTOS?" in Hall 2, booth 2C05.

Bare Metal Engine provides a light-weight, configurable run-time environment that delivers RTOS performance inside a Linux environment. Bare Metal Engine lets users create a dedicated environment to run user-space applications, providing bare-metal execution and performance all within a Linux environment. Bare Metal Engine provides multiple out of the box configurations, allowing users to choose their own unique balance between system-services and bare metal performance.

"This really is the most optimal environment for multi-core SoC's," said Jim Ready, Founder and CTO of MontaVista, LLC. "Today, many applications are suffering from poor performance because they cannot get high speed access to the I/O subsystem on the SoC on which they run. With Bare Metal Engine your application gets direct access to the SoC and other system hardware for maximum performance."

In the past, development teams had to choose between running an RTOS or Linux, high performance or services. With MontaVista's Bare Metal Engine environment you get the best of both worlds, an extremely high performance application with access to all the Linux services without the additional overhead of a hypervisor. Bare Metal Engine provides a very high performance application environment without having to resort to complex kernel level development. By enabling dedication of I/O to user space applications Bare Metal Engine opens a new world of flexibility with high performance applications that don't have to be in the kernel, or coded in C language. This means application developers have greater access to performance than ever before. 

Using Cavium's OCTEON II CN63xx multi-core SoC targeted for network applications and an Ixia XM2 Chassis to collect performance metrics, trade show attendees will witness the power of Bare Metal Engine when if faces off against a highly optimized kernel packet forwarding application. The first configuration will measure the performance of a highly optimized Carrier Grade Linux kernel in full SMP mode making use of six OCTEON II cores to push 64 byte packets across multiple gigabit Ethernet network cards. The demo will then show Bare Metal Engine achieving the same level of IP Forwarding performance using a single dedicated core vs. the six cores required in standard Linux. MontaVista's Bare Metal Engine increases the performance of Linux over 600% and frees up cores to do other work.