Lynx Real-Time Systems, Inc. Teams up with Sun's SPARC Technology Business to Provide Embedded SPARC Solutions with PosixWorks

SAN JOSÉ, CA—September 12, 1995—Lynx Real-Time Systems, Inc. today announced a strategic marketing agreement with Sun's SPARC Technology Business to provide Lynx's PosixWorks as a part of Sun's Embedded SPARC Advantage Strategy.

"SPARC Technology Business sees the PosixWorks framework as a key enabler for embedded-systems developers who prefer a toolset approach. The addition of the TotalView debugger will be key to supporting the multithreaded applications already popular on SPARC-based systems," said Michael Joplin, embedded strategy marketing manager at Sun's SPARC Technology Business.

This agreement is aimed at providing complete solutions for the emerging real-time embedded applications emphasizing networked computing in a UNIX®/POSIX® open systems environment.

"Lynx is pleased to expand our relationship with Sun and strengthen the support of the Lynx Real-Time Operating System on SPARC" says Dr. Inder Singh, CEO and President of Lynx. "Lynx's emphasis on open systems with UNIX/POSIX compatibility and integrated networking support is an excellent match with Sun's approach. PosixWorks from Lynx provides the integrated development and easy deployment elements which are a key part of Sun's embedded SPARC Advantage strategy. Thanks to this new strategy and our strengthened relationship with Sun, creating real-time solutions using Lynx and SPARC will be faster to market than ever before."

"With PosixWorks, Lynx has extended its POSIX-based open systems approach from the real-time operating system (RTOS) to the whole development and debugging environment," according to Singh. "The PosixWorks framework is designed to help the developer of today's increasingly complex, software-intensive embedded applications. It is unique in its comprehensive support of multiple processors/processes/threads in the embedded framework, and in allowing users to develop network applications in a heterogeneous environment consisting of LynxOS targets as well as other POSIX/UNIX® systems such as Solaris™. The high degree of compatibility and interoperability between LynxOS and Solaris will be a big plus for developers of SPARC-based embedded systems."

With PosixWorks, an embedded system developer can debug a complex real-time application consisting of multiple concurrent processes, each of which may contain one or more threads, and which may be executing on multiple target CPUs. Previously software engineers had to attack each target CPU in a networked environment separately and could not easily determine performance of complex interactions among targets and tasks. With this new product, embedded development occurs either in a self-hosted environment under LynxOS, or using cross development on a Sun workstation, or both.

PosixWorks currently consists of the following components:

• LynxOS. The core of PosixWorks is LynxOS, the only UNIX-compatible, POSIX-compliant RTOS for embedded applications certified by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for POSIX conformance. LynxOS is a complete, but highly scaleable, operating system ideally suited for complex, mission-critical hard real-time and embedded applications.
  
  
• GNU C and C++ industry standard language tools.
  
  
• TotalView™, the first systems-oriented, network knowledgeable source debugger for embedded applications, offers unique capabilities for debugging, from a single TotalView session, multiple processes or threads of an application which may be executing on one or more CPUs. With TotalView, an embedded software developer can "attach" to any process or thread of a running application to examine its behavior, stop and start groups of threads/processes at breakpoints, and interactively apply modifications to help diagnose difficult problems even in distributed, heterogeneous systems which incorporate nodes running UNIX/POSIX OSes other than LynxOS.
  
  
• TimeScan™ is a powerful "software logic analyzer" for analyzing, visualizing, troubleshooting and performance optimization of real-time applications. With TimeScan, the real-time software developer can capture and process event logs time-stamped with submicrosecond resolution, display user selected events and states for different processes/threads against a timeline, and compute or display timing statistics for individual states. As with TotalView, TimeScan supports distributed multithreaded, heterogeneous applications.

LynuxWorks press contacts

Kirsten Long Director, Marketing Communications LynuxWorks, Inc. USA +1 408-979-4404	Barbara Stewart Patterson & Associates USA 480-488-6909
Hamid Mirab Managing Director EMEA LynuxWorks Ltd. United Kingdom +44 208-906-9506	Peter van der Sluijs Neesham Public Relations Europe +44 1442-879222