Medallion Software Technology

Medallion Linux

Techsol products all ship with the Linux Operating System (OS).
Whether you buy a standard CPU module, or get a custom design engineered for you, you get to leverage dozens of man-years of SW engineering.
And that SW has all been developed, tested, and proven on our Medallion HW platform.

Medallion Software Technology

We call this integrated HW and SW system the "Medallion System".
A partial list of "Medallion System" Advantages include:

• Reduced Time-to-Market
• Reduced non-recurring engineering costs
• Very low recurring engineering costs
• No run time software license required
• Easy to customize and upgrade
• Proven, reliable technology

See "What are the advantages of using Medallion CPU Modules?" for a more detailed list.

In addition, you get piles of Free Bundled Software, including:

• Techsol's robust, developer-friendly Boot-Loader stack to speed development and simplify upgrades
• Embedded Linux OS with customized drivers (with source)
• Linux Development Tools (with source)
• GDB Debugger
• Small-footprint Flash-based OS
• Root file system with BusyBox
• TCP/IP Stack plus development utilities
• Linux file security
• FTP for remote updates
• Device drivers for standard peripherals
• Piles of GUIs to choose from!
• PyGTK for writing GTK+ GUI programs in Python
• QtEmbedded GUI from Trolltech
• USB Host support for Mass Storage, input devices, cameras, WiFi, etc.
• USB Device (Gadget) support for IP over USB
• Cellular support for GSM/GPRS, and CDMA-1X

Plus, you can select from these (cost extra) Options:

• a JVM (Java Virtual Machine)
• FancyPants GUI from Fluffy Spider Technologies

Techsol's Medallion Software Frequently Asked Questions

If you cannot find an answer on this page, please e-mail <support@techsol.ca>.

What software is shipped with Medallion CPU modules?

We normally ship units with Linux preinstalled in the DiskOnChip (DOC) or NAND flash. The following table describes our SW architecture:

Our minimum flash configuration is 2 MB. It contains our proprietary boot loader/debugger and configuration info. It allows the unit to be recovered in case a program accidentally deletes the OS from the NAND flash/DOC. The initial boot loader uses the serial port as a console.

Techsol's toolchain is based on BitBake and OpenEmbedded.

BitBake is a simple tool for the execution of tasks. It is derived from Portage, which is the package management system used by the Gentoo Linux distribution. It is most commonly used to build packages, and is used as the basis of the OpenEmbedded project. — BitBake project summary

OpenEmbedded is a collection of metadata used in combination with BitBake. OpenEmbedded consists of BitBake recipes (.bb files).

A BitBake recipe, which is equivalent to an ebuild file in Portage, is a text file containing instructions for building a software package from its source distribution. Both Portage and BitBake automatically resolve build and runtime dependencies. This enables the user to build a desired package without having to manually locate, obtain, and build all of the package's dependencies, the dependencies's dependencies, and so on; both Portage and BitBake do all this work automatically.

Techsol's toolchain can be used inside the host environment (alongside the host's native build tools) or inside a chroot environment.

A chroot environment is a self-contained environment used on a Linux PC for cross-building for Medallion targets.

chroot means change root directory: to build distributions (file system images) for a Medallion computer or build applications or packages for Medallion Linux, a developer uses a shell (command-line interface) on a Linux PC to change the root directory to Techsol's OpenEmbedded chroot environment. This helps isolate the build environment from the host environment, to reduce problems caused by different PC Linux distributions, software configurations and versions, etc.

We do not charge licenses for Techsol's SW or tools on products we build. However, IBM charges for their JVM, so anything with Java support has a license (starting at 20 USD in low volume, dropping to 3 USD or less in high volumes) If someone wants to build products from our design then we can license it to you and we are flexible on terms. We have licensed to low-volume customers (military-medical equipment) and high-volume customers (Verifone uses our platform for some of their credit card payment terminals); every situation is unique.