MontaVista partners with Mercury Systems Inc. to provide hardened Linux support for the aerospace & defense market

- MontaVista Software, LLC, a leader in commercial Embedded Linux products and services, announced the availability of MontaVista's Carrier Grade eXpress (CGX) 3.1 on Mercury Systems' MFCC-8558 and MFCC-8559 platforms. The joint enablement is initially being developed for a major aerospace Tier1 customer deployment and will be available to the entire market as a General Availability release from MontaVista.

The CGX 3.1 release contains the Linux 5.4 LTS kernel integrated with the Yocto Project 3.1 LTS build system and user-space applications, including features applicable to this demanding market and its challenging use-cases such as:

- Advanced security: Trusted Boot and Integrity Management solutions to mitigate the exposure of customer's products on the field.

- Carrier-Grade Maintainability: Field-debugging, logging and tracing solutions to allow lower return rates and improved SW quality.

- Linux Hard Real-time support: Very low-latency processing for latency intensive applications such as industrial control and advanced data processing.

- Readiness to achieve industry-standard security certifications, like the Common Criteria EAL4+.

CGX is a long-term supported Linux distribution, providing unique value by supporting security and maintenance patch streams for 10 years or more, allowing customers to focus development on a single stable baseline. Such an approach avoids excess risk and liability because of unforeseen regressions that typically pertain to using community development in a continuous update model.

The MontaVista CGX 3.1 platform is available now, and the board support package (BSP) for the Mercury Systems Inc. MFCC-series hardware will be available within 1H/2021.

Supporting Quotes:

"We are very excited to announce our long-term alignment with Mercury Systems. This collaboration provides excellent synergy and matching of product values such as robust technology and long lifecycle support for our joint customers," said Iisko Lappalainen, Director of Product Management at MontaVista. "We continue to push the boundaries of making Linux suitable for more advanced, secure and mission critical use-cases and this partnership is a great validation of it."

"Mercury relies on MontaVista for proven experience and long-term support in robust and secure Open Source solutions. Our Aerospace and Defense customers need dependable hardware and software solutions to achieve not only tough industry requirements and certifications, but extremely demanding mission parameters and environments. Together with MontaVista, we at Mercury are meeting and exceeding these expectations," said Nathalie Garcia, Project Manager, Mercury Systems.