Enea has announced that Version 5.4 of its OSE real-time operating system adds symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) support for multicore CPUs, beginning with Freescale's PowerPC-based MPC8641D and MPC8572DS processors. Other key features include a new demand pager that supports dynamic load modules, and an enhanced IP stack with IPv6 support.

"The majority of communications processors will be multicore processors by 2012," said Enea's Terry Pearson. "To help network equipment providers take full advantage of these high-performance processors in both the control and user plane, Enea is taking a two-pronged approach. First, to deliver an immediate performance boost with minimal impact on legacy applications, we are providing traditional SMP support. Meanwhile, we are working on a more advanced multicore architecture known as FlexMP that combines the performance and compatibility of SMP with the flexibility and real-time responsiveness of asymmetric multiprocessing."

OSE is a modular, high-performance, real-time operating system optimized for complex distributed systems. OSE's pre-emptive real-time response, memory protection, supervision, error handling, and run-time program loading is designed for building fault-tolerant distributed systems that offer deterministic real-time behavior with five nines or higher availability.

OSE employs a high-level message-passing programming model which, the company claims, makes complex applications easier to conceptualize, model, partition, and debug. It also provides transparency that separates applications from the details of the underlying hardware and physical topology, making the resulting code more portable and scalable.