Red Hat signs Sanyo, Motorola deals

Red Hat has signed deals to bring its GNUPro software-development tools to Sanyo's Xstormy16 CPU and to support the AltiVec instructions in Motorola PowerPC chips, the companies said this week. The deals, announced at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco, thus far involve only Red Hat's GNUPro development tools for writing and debugging software. Red Hat, though, always seeks expanded contracts that involve Linux and another open-source operating system called eCos, a Red Hat representative said.

Sanyo's Xstormy16 is used in devices without much computing power, including audio devices and home appliances. AltiVec is technology built into many PowerPC chips that speeds up operations such as audio processing. The technology is useless, however, unless software can take advantage of it, and supporting AltiVec in GNUPro will allow Linux to get past that roadblock.