Lynx Software Technologies

Lynx Software Technologies, Inc. (formerly LynuxWorks) is a San Jose, California software company founded in 1988. Lynx Software Technologies specializes in secure virtualization and open and reliable real-time operating system (RTOS). Originally known as Lynx Real-Time Systems, the company changed its name to LynuxWorks in 2000 after acquiring, and merging with, ISDCorp (Integrated Software & Devices Corporation) a nine-year-old embedded systems company with a strong Linux background. In May 2014, the company changed its name to Lynx Software Technologies as a representation of the company’s forward direction as the LynxOS RTOS family of products and the LynxSecure hypervisor continued to gain increased traction both with current customers and markets, and with the new Internet connected embedded world.

Lynx Software Technologies has created technology that has been successfully deployed in thousands of designs and millions of products made by leading communications, industrial, transportation, avionics, aerospace/defense and consumer electronics companies. In 1989, LynxOS, the company's flagship real-time operating system, was selected for use in the NASA/IBM Space Station Freedom project.^[1] Lynx Software Technologies operating systems are also used in medical, industrial and communications systems around the world.^[2]

Lynx Software Technologies is held in private. In 2000, the company filed a registration statement for Initial Public Offering,^[3] but later withdrew those plans due to unfavourable economic conditions.^[4]

Operating system evolution and history

LynxOS is the company's real-time operating system. It is UNIX-compatible and POSIX-compliant. It features predictable worst-case response time, preemptive scheduling, real-time priorities, ROMable kernel, and memory locking. With LynxOS 7.0 is marketed as a military grade Operating system, and is intended for developers to embed these security features as they design their system, rather than adding security as an afterthought. This security can be used to protect both user accessible and also machine to machine (M2M) based embedded devices utilizing access control lists, audit, quotas, local trusted path, account management, trusted menu manager and OpenPAM.

The LynxSecure Hypervisor ("bare metal," type 1) and separation kernel was released in 2005.

In 2003, the company introduced the LynxOS-178 real-time operating system, a specialized version of LynxOS geared toward avionics applications that require certification to industry standards such as DO-178B. LynxOS-178 is a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) RTOS that fully satisfies the objectives of the DO-178B level A specification and meets requirements for Integrated Modular Avionics developers.

In 2000, Lynx Software Technologies released its first embedded Linux distribution, BlueCat Linux 1.0, and specialized in paravirtualized Linux for embedded systems with virtualization.

Lynx Software Technologies' patents on LynxOS technology include patent #5,469,571, "Operating System Architecture using Multiple Priority Light Weight kernel Task-based Interrupt Handling," November 21, 1995, and patent #5,594,903, "Operating System architecture with reserved memory space resident program code identified in file system name space," January 14, 1997.^[5]

The Usenet newsgroup comp.os.lynx, established in 1993, serves as an unmoderated forum for general discussion of LynxOS and LynuxWorks.

References