SAN JOSE, Calif.—The Multicore Association (MCA) launched a new working group to expand and set a standard for the Open Asymmetric Multi-Processing Framework. OpenAMP is a Linux software framework for systems using multiple operating systems and processors.

The framework helps application developers tap the parallelism in systems using multiple multicore processors of the same or different kinds. It works across versions of Linux, real-time operating systems and bare-metal software environments.

Initial members of the working group are Express Logic, Mentor Graphics, Micrium, NXP, Renesas, Wind River and Xilinx. “While Xilinx has already implemented an initial version of OpenAMP for our Zynq products, we believe that this is just the tip of the iceberg in taking advantage of the potential capabilities of this framework,” said Tomas Evensen, CTO of embedded software at Xilinx, who will chair the group.OpenAMP has support for shared memory protocol, inter-process communication, resource management and sharing, and remote process control. Versions of the open source code are already available, supported by a handful of companies.