MontaVista Software today announced a new release of Mobilinux, a product built to address key areas of development for mobile and wireless devices. Mobilinux includes tools to help reduce footprint, saving on RAM and Flash. Mobilinux 4.1 incorporates technologies such as uClibc, squashfs and DirectFB and developer tools focused on memory analysis, which allow for significantly reduced total memory footprint.

"For handset manufacturers, sustainable competitive advantage requires cost and time-to-market efficiencies and product differentiation.  Globally, manufacturers are looking to Linux as the platform for their next generation designs," said John Jackson, senior analyst, The Yankee Group. "MontaVista Software’s work in adapting Linux for the mobile handset market has catalyzed a platform migration movement among many of the top manufacturers. MontaVista Linux alone now powers 20 million phones. Most of these are in Asia with tremendous expansion beginning in the European and North American markets."

Mobilinux is an optimized Linux operating system and development environment, ideally suited for wireless handsets and mobile devices. Mobilinux Features Include:

• Footprint Improvements
• uClibc – create full-featured C/C++ applications
• DirectFB – ability to build more mobile applications with robust graphics support
• Squashfs – increased file system capacity for persistent data storage
• Improved stability and reliability
• Footprint improvements vs traditional X Windows apps
• Advanced Real-Time Support
• Support requirements for mass-market, single-chip phone designs
• Power Management Improvements
• Dynamic Power Management (DPM) improves power performance through adjustments on-the-fly
• MontaVista Power Manager
• Platform independent DPM Library
• Variable Scheduling Timeouts (VST)
• Memory-type based allocation (MTA)