I talk to a lot of networking vendors that tell me that they’re running Linux inside of their devices. The problem that I usually encounter is that the vendors hardly ever tell me where their Linux is sourced from (kernel.org or otherwise).
With Alcatel-Lucent, that’s now changing as they’ve officially revealed that they’re using Wind River as their embedded Linux vendor of choice, as part of a new wireless networking gear roll-out.
Alcatel-Lucent will be using a Wind River Linux platform based on the 2.6.34 kernel including the PREEMPT RT realtime kernel patch to improve latency and determinism.
Sure there are likely plenty of embedded networking vendors that do in fact build their own Linux distros from a kernel.org or CentOS base – but it does make sense to rely on a partner Wind River in this case (though MontaVista makes a fine embedded Linux as well).
“The need for higher speeds from wireless networks requires top performance, and to achieve this we needed to look to the latest multi-core technologies integrated with a world-class Linux distribution,” said Bill Zucker, vice president of wireless common assets and platforms at Alcatel-Lucent in a statement.
