Technologic Systems continues to reduce the boot time, price, and size of
its rugged embedded boards and systems targeting remote sensing and other
power-critical applications. Its new ARM9-based TS-7400 System-on-Module
can boot Linux in 1.1 seconds.
FAST BOOTUP AND FLEXIBLE FIRMWARE
The TS-7400 SoM boots to Linux from NAND flash in 1.1 seconds using the
proprietary TS-FLASHBOOT bootup firmware residing in ROM memory. It can
also boot from an SD Card, through the TS-SDBOOT firmware. The TS-7400
Ultra-Fast bootup solution was optimized for speed and includes kernel,
initrd and filesystem (Busybox) tweaks. In addition, the hardware
accelerated NAND flash controller is an unique feature implemented in the
on-board CPLD that provides hardware ECC, allowing the system to skip
software ECC during startup and enabling bootup to a Linux shell prompt in
1.1 seconds. Since the TS-7400 actually boots to an initrd with a
read-only mounted filesystem, it is possible to have something other than
a shell prompt running after bootup by editing the /linuxrc shell script
on the initrd.
COMPLETE DRIVER SUPPORT
The TS-7400 ARM SoM is compatible with a wide range of Operating Systems.
The Linux OS, TS-Kernel 2.4.26, is shipped by default with the TS-7400 and
includes complete driver support for our hardware within the Kernel,
enabling quick time to market of end-users applications and providing an
out-of-the-box solution. This version of Linux contains Apache, SSH, PPP,
and FTP server and many other common utilities and libraries. Examples and
source codes are also available for downloading.
The default SD card with Debian Linux contains compilers and everything
needed for developing applications in C, C++, PERL, PHP, and SH. Java,
BASIC, TCL, Python and others are available for Debian, but not installed
by default. One can still use cross-compilers hosted on just about any
platform if there is a specific need. Technologic systems includes binary
versions of the popular Linux "crosstool" project at
http://www.kegel.com/crosstool/ to allow cross-compiling on Windows/cygwin
or a Linux/i386 PC on the www.embeddedARM.com website.
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