Re: MontaVista opinions?

We went with MV for my current Xilinx V4 based project. The theory was that
we'd have something working out of the box (particularly 2.6 kernel based)
so we could just focus on the signal processing part of our project. The
reality has been:

devrocket (the main MV tool) is very buggy particularly the tool for the
root file system. I frequently have to close and reopen to get changes to
take affect.
documentation is mediocre
integration is poor - basically if you don't know how to build a linux
kernel and filesystem from scratch you'll not be able to do it with the MV
tool either
support is okay - we get decent turn around on questions but frequently end
up with they don't support or don't have ready the piece we need
coverage is poor - they are stuck back at the 2.6.10 and on my platform
elementary things like an SPI driver are missing

The last item is really the kicker. I don't care what your project is,
eventually you are going to be rooting around menuconfig or patching driver
code or figuring out how to use objcopy, etc. to the point that EVENTUALLY
you'll have to know everything MV knows about your platform anyway. So do
you want to deal with all the glitches with the mainline kernel code AND all
of the bugs/glitches in the MV tools or just the former.

Personally, I think MV is biting off more than it can chew by trying to
support dozens of processors. If they focused on a pre-rolled Xilinx tree
that really worked with the Xilinx tools and was a one button click to
generate kernel, modules, RFS into a single .bin to burn to flash they'd add
a lot more value.

MV was good in that I was able to get SOMETHING up quickly to show my bosses
but the overall value to the project is considerably less than the $30K we
paid for it. But that's not MV's fault, the real problem in my case is that
Xilinx has farmed out Linux to MV rather than doing it themselves. The
result is a "worst of both worlds" solution that's left my team wasting time
on stupid little things that have nothing to do with our product.

-Clark


"Dave Littell" <littelld_nospam@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:akdih.2601$Jb6.909@xxxxxxxxxxx
Hi all,

Does anyone have any observations/opinions they'd like to share
regarding MontaVista's embedded Linux products?

Performance?
Support?
Cost?


Thanks,
Dave


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