Virage Logic has announced it is investing in its ARC processor product portfolio by releasing the ARC GNU 2.3 Toolchain for its complete range of ARC processor cores and the ARC Linux 1.3 operating system for its ARC 750D processor. The suite contains the ARC Linux 2.6.30 kernel for the ARC 750D processor, and a GCC 4.2.1 based ARC GNU Toolchain for Virage Logic's complete range of ARC processor cores.
"Linux and GNU have seen renewed interest among software developers thanks to the exploding popularity of Android," said Mike Thompson, director of product marketing for Processor and SoC Solutions at Virage Logic. "Virage Logic is committed to supporting GNU and Linux for its ARC processor cores to give customers a broad choice in the selection of development tools for their specific application."
The ARC GNU and ARC Linux Toolchains are professional quality products that have been thoroughly verified with the extensive community test suites, according to Virage Logic. The tools have been optimized to take full advantage of the ARC processor architecture, and Virage Logic's ARC Open Source Tools are supported on the ARC Instruction Set Simulators that enable software development long before silicon is available.
About Virage Logic's ARC Linux and ARC GNU toolchain release
The ARC Linux kernel allows ARC 750D processor users to leverage the abundance of free Open Source Software available in the Linux ecosystem. This enables them to build complex applications quickly while greatly reducing cost and time-to-market by re-using Open Source libraries and packages. The kernel is tuned to take full advantage of the ARC processor architecture features for optimal performance and comes with BusyBox, uboot and InitRamFS to jumpstart development.
The ARC GNU Toolchain is available for Virage Logic's complete range of ARC cores, both the ARC 6xx and ARC 7xx series. It fully supports the ARCompact instruction set architecture, as well as the ARC DSP and ARC SIMD extension instructions. It contains a GCC compiler and GDB debugger for C and C++, with the must have libraries and utilities that make up a complete software toolchain. The GNU Toolchain offers a widely used and cost-effective development environment. It is a standard known by software professionals around the world and provides a well-known and cost-effective development environment for ARC processors.
The ARC Open Source Tools are available now free of charge and may be downloaded at http://sourceforge.net/projects/arc-linux/.
