This is the first in a series of posts describing how MontaVista Linux 6 can make your development cycle faster, and also how it can help keep you sane in a crazy world.

To start with, the biggest change in MVL6 is in content delivery—how we get bits to you to play with. In the past, MontaVista Linux shipped with a standardized kernel, the same for all platforms, and a Linux Support Package (LSP) which consisted of a set of supporting patches, utilities, drivers, userland bits, and development tools. The patched kernel and the rest of the LSP provided developers with a customized work environment for a particular hardware platform.

MontaVista Linux 6 improves on that by serving all those bits from a central Content Server. The tools we provide to access that content are called the Integration Platform, and they consist of a few very easy-to-use project management utilities and a very powerful open-source build tool called BitBake. BitBake is like make on steroids, and it has the ability to automatically download all of the content you need from the MontaVista Content Server. BitBake’s real strength is in the large, integrated, tested set of metadata that enables it to build an bootable image (kernel and root filesystem) with a single command. Adding new components or customizing existing ones is easy, repeatable, and well-planned.

The other major change from previous versions of MontaVista Linux is the introduction of Market-Specific Distributions (MSDs). These are functionally similar to LSPs, but instead of being a set of patches and additional bits, MSDs are complete, optimized distribution mechanisms in themselves: specific to a market rather than an individual board, feature-complete with the Linux distribution from the hardware vendor, and packed with MontaVista-supplied add-ons, quality testing, support, and build metadata.

Watch this space for more information about MVL6.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 3rd, 2009 at 12:56 pm and is filed under Education, MVL6.