April 1, 2014, EE Live Conference, San Jose, CA—Kamal Khouri from AMD and Warren Kurisu from Mentor Graphics described their new partnership to supply Linux development tools for embedded systems for the various AMD processors. The intent of the partnership is to provide robust development tools, libraries, and workflows for more embedded processors.
AMD decided to provide better hardware support in the form of development boards to address the expanding range of processors for embedded systems. The latest board support packages are for the G-series SoC (codenamed "Steppe Eagle") and R-series APU/CPU (codenamed "Bald Eagle"). Other boards are available for the other X86 processor families and for the ARM-based products.
Mentor is providing their free Embedded Linux Lite package for evaluation and prototyping functions for the G and R processors. This subset of existing tools offers solutions for fast and simple evaluations and services. The complete toolset is Yocto project compatible and includes full binary images of root file system and kernel as well as source for all open source components.
In addition, developers will have access to the full Linux development platform and an Eclipse-based Sourcery CodeBench for measuring system performance, software and hardware profiling, and debugging. The full platform will be provided for normal commercial terms and includes bug fixes, security patches, and product updates. The development system can be customized for unique project needs including custom board development, back porting, and other long-term support.
The value of the partnership is in bringing the diverse talents and expertise of AMD and Mentor to the embedded development space in embedded Linux projects. The intent is to bring scale and improve reuse of existing code to the heterogeneous compute architecture.
The toolset provides a means for embedded developers who have safety considerations, as in medical and automotive products etc., to adhere to the various safety standards through the use of known compliant modules. Safety standard compliance is facilitated by the extensive debug and trace tools in the toolset, which can provide insights into the complex interactions of code in a multiprocessor systems.