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Version 6.8 of Wind River’s VxWorks real-time operating system (RTOS) is now available. According to the company, this update delivers improvements in multicore support and fundamental OS features, decreasing time-to-market while lowering costs and improving quality for device manufacturers.

This high-performance, commercial-grade RTOS addresses the diverse needs of embedded systems, Wind River says. It provides product differentiation via increased performance, a smaller footprint, and hardware platform flexibility. Also, the company says, its improved OS primitives, USB support, and file system performance give customers increased product quality, more compatibility, and improved product performance.

Version 6.8 offers a standards-compliant solution and comprehensive mobile IP support to provide devices with next-generation networking capabilities for 4G and pre-4G, including Long-Term Evolution (LTE) and WiMAX technologies. It additionally provides increased multicore processor support for the Intel Core i7 processor, ARM MPCore, and Cortex A9; Freescale QorlQ P2020; Cavium 54xx, 55xx, 56xx, 57xx, and 58xx; and RMI XLR and XLS. This should enable customers to choose the processor that best fits their needs.

The version’s updates also include symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) performance improvements and SMP core reservation, as well as asymmetric multiprocessing (AMP) enhancements such as AMP spin locks. There’s a major upgrade to Wind River’s multi-OS inter-process communication with MIPC version 2.0, raising the bar for multicore capabilities with even higher performance thresholds as well.

Version 6.8’s new small ARM footprint profile enables the creation of embedded applications with very small memory requirements. Significant developer tool productivity improvements include VxWorks core dump file and analysis. And, version 6.8 offers improvements to the multicore and multi-OS debugging and user workflows.

Available as part of VxWorks Edition 3.8, VxWorks 6.8 is available immediately to customers worldwide. For more, go to www.windriver.com/announces/vxworks6.8/.