Linux At Home In Mobile Phones

Nov. 5, 2007

MontaVista's Mobilinux 5.0 brings a host of new features to the mobile-phone space. At the top of the list is Micro-SELinux, MontaVista's subset of the NSA-sponsored SELinux (Security Enhanced Linux). Pruning SELinux allows mandatory, policy-based access control to be implemented on low-end embedded platforms. The basic Mobilinux weighs in under 2 Mbytes, though typical systems are on the order of 16 Mbytes. Mobilinux boots quickly (under 5 s), enabling a cell call to be placed in under 10 s. Advanced powermanagement support can extend battery life up to 80%. Other benefits include low-level kernel debugging over a USB link as well as support for a host of mobile peripherals, including Bluetooth, SDIO, and USB. Mobilinux is bundled with MontaVista's open-source development tools and the Eclipse-based DevRocket integrated development environment (IDE). Mobilinux is sold using an annual subscription service.

MontaVista www.mvista.com

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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