Concurrent Puts Out Update of RedHawk Real-Time Linux

Published: May 6, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

While Linux is well known for its stability and ruggedness, for certain embedded and real-time applications, even Linux needs a little extra help (as do various Unixes, for that matter) in being suitable for running the most sensitive and pressing workloads. That's why Concurrent Computer and Wind River Systems, which have substantial experience in real-time operating systems, exist. To keep current with the advances in Linux features, Concurrent recently updated its RedHawk real-time Linux platform.

While Concurrent partnered with commercial Linux supplier Novell a year and a half ago to create a real-time variant of SUSE Linux called SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time, or SLERT for short, the company's own real-time Linux distribution is designed to be compatible with the code from commercial Linux leader Red Hat.

The latest update to Concurrent's RedHawk Linux brings it up to the Linux 2.6.23 kernel level and offering full compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, the most current commercial release from Red Hat. The updated platform supports the most recent quad-core Xeon and Opteron chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices and their related chipsets, the latest graphics drivers for nVidia graphics cards, user-level driver support, and optimizations for non-uniform memory access (NUMA) clustering, which is built into Opteron processors by default and is also available in large-scale Xeon processors. The tunings for NUMA in RedHawk Linux 5.1 were specifically aimed at improving determinism in real-time processes in NUMA systems based on the Opteron chips. The user-level I/O device driver support lets a programmer create a user-space, non-kernel driver for almost any piece of hardware, which means in plain English that a driver can't mess with the kernel and has a harder time crashing the system.

In addition to updating RedHawk Linux, Concurrent has also tweaked its NightStar application development tools, with the most important addition being an interface into the new lockless kernel trace that was added to Red Hawk Linux 5.1. This makes debugging the applications running on NUMA systems a bit easier, according to Concurrent.

Concurrent makes and sells its own line of iHawk X64 servers, which span up to 32 cores in a single system image, as well as variants for visualization, called ImaGen, and content delivery, called MediaHawk. These all run RedHawk Linux.

In a separate announcement, Concurrent reported its third quarter results for fiscal 2008. For the quarter ended March 31, Concurrent's sales rose by 20 percent to $19.4 million; real-time products accounted for $7.3 million, down 11 percent, while its other on-demand products (including systems) accounted for $12.1 million, up 28.7 million. Concurrent brought $301,000 to the bottom line in the third fiscal quarter, but this was a lot better than the $769,000 it lost in the second fiscal quarter and the $3.1 million it lost in the year-ago quarter. The company exited the quarter with $24.6 million in cash, and having stabilized, Concurrent is now interested in getting shareholder approval for a 10 to 1 reverse stock split to give its shares a more psychologically appealing price on the NASDAQ, where Concurrent's shares trade at 67 cents each as we go to press this week.

Earlier this month, Concurrent announced that Gary Trimm, who has been chief executive officer at the company for nearly four years, is retiring and that Dan Mondor, who was president at Mitel Networks, has been brought in as the new CEO. Steve Nussrallah remains Concurrent's chairman of the board.

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