August 14, 2006

-- Embedded Alley Solutions, Inc, and Silicon Turnkey Express (STx), announced immediate availability of a Linux RapidIO Development Kit (LRDK) for the STx AMC8548 board (http://www.silicontkx.com/AMC8548.htm).

Said Matt Porter, author of the RapidIO community support for Linux, "The LRDK provides the first open source solution that will expedite the development and use of RapidIO connectivity on Linux systems."

Robert Applebaum, President of STx added, "STx is the only RIOLAB supplier of this board and the only supplier to have done interoperability testing for the 8548. This is our 4th PQ3 design, giving our customers a solid base to build their products on."

The LRDK includes validated software components for RapidIO including a Board Support Package (BSP), RapidIO kernel support, RapidIO network driver, RapidIO user space library support, and RapidIO user space sample code and utilities. The following features are supported:

• Linux Device Model compliant subsystem encapsulating RapidIO hardware devices.
• Resource management framework for managing doorbell, mailbox, and MMIO region resources.
• Enumeration and discovery of all RapidIO devices using the RapidIO specification suggested algorithm.
• Direct access to RapidIO doorbells and mailboxes via a kernel driver API. Access to RapidIO messaging from user space via the BSD sockets API and a Linux RapidIO network driver.
• Direct support for MPC8540, MPC8560, MPC8548, Tsi500, and Tsi568 devices.
• Designed with software hooks to support additional features such as kernel and user space access to MMIO regions, user space access to doorbell messaging, port write management and notification, and user space controlled system enumeration.