The graphic environment is compatible with the X11 and Motif® standards.
A large offer of development and debugging tools are available (see http://www.lynusworks.com) The LynuxWorks Open Development Environment (ODE) includes a variety of open-source tools and utilities, including many derived from the Free Software Foundations's GNU family.The GNU Toolchain. A complete suite of open-source GNU solutions
GNU compilation and debugging tools including standard gcc g++ ANSI C and C++ compilers as well as the gas assembler for the PowerPc family. Versions of GNAT are available from Ada Core Technologies and g77 from LynuxWorks ftp site. Other Ada compilers from Rational, Aonix,Irvine Compiler and DDCI are available.
Exceptions handling are managed by the kernel. Specific High Availability Packages can be purchased from LynusWorks, they provide enhanced capabilities for this purpose.
LynxOS® provides API and ABI compatibility especially with Linux® Kernel v2.4.x.
LynxOS® is a UNIX® / POSIX conforming RTOS. It is fully conformant with POSIX interfaces for core services (1003.1), real-time extensions(.1b), and thread extensions(.1c). Moreover, it provides ABI compatibility with Linux®. Linux® application binaries can run unchanged in the LynxOS® environment without necessitating source code recompilation thanks to enhanced API compatibility and specific Dynamic Linked Libraries.
It has over 150 system calls that are similar with the Linux® system call API. In order to enhance compatibility, some system calls have been added to LynxOS® API (e.g. fchdir, setresuid, setresgid, wait4). Signal numbers were changed to match with the Linux® numbering scheme, constants used for IOCTL were changed to match Linux®, the error numbers returned by systm calls (errno) were changed to match Linux®.
LynxOS® v4.0 uses a modified version of the Linux® GLIBC dynamic library to resolve application calls at run-time. This modified GLIBC library provides the translation between Linux® and LynxOS® system calls. This permits the use of a broad spectrum of Linux® system calls including Pthread interfaces,Asynchronous IO, Networking and other POSIX interfaces.
LynxOS®-Linux® ABI compatibility is currently dependent on a Linux® kernel and GLIBC pair. LynxOS® v4.0 supports applications based on Linux® kernel v2.4.x and GLIBC v2.2.2/v2.2.4
New facilities have been added to facilitate dynamic library linkage. Build on relocation capabilities of ELF it may save considerable memory if many applications reuse a same code base. It also helps maintenance upgrades because applications need not be recompiled when the library is updated (providing API doesn't change as well).
LynxOS® doesn't support lazy linking. A spawn application is always linked completely at initialization. Default in LynxOS® is statically linked applications.
dlopen() and other standard interfaces are also supported.