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Here's your BIOS.

I can think of only a few major brand Android tablets that have locked bootloaders, and all of these have been defeated:

* Nook Tablet
* Nook HD
* Nook HD+
* Kindle HD 7"
* Kindle HD 8.9"

All use u-boot an open-sourced bootloader, and all had implementation flaws. (Actually, the flaws WERE their implementation in the first place. Let's say both had "available fixes".)

Other tablets such as the Nexus 7 and 10 have locked bootloaders too, but they are unlockable via fastboot and the command "fastboot oem unlock".

Malware in the closed binary blob firmware and bootloader. Closed gpu libs. Not being able to boot your own kernel. Not being able to boot off the block device or location of choice. To name a few.

Lots of people care. That is why so many people reverse engineer their ARM tablets and cell phones. That is why there are open firmware projects like http://www.coreboot.org/ coreboot, http://kexecboot.org/ kexecboot and http://www.denx.de/wiki/U-Boot u-boot. Take a look at the http://wiki.opengraphics.org/tiki-index.php Open Graphics Project or http://elinux.org/Embedded_Open_Modular_Architecture/PCMCIA mentioned earlier in the comments here for what and why.

What clueless clickwit modded this up? Das U-Boot is an open source bootloader, mostly aimed at embedded systems. If the parent wanted to highlight an open source alternative for UEFI, he should have mentioned Coreboot. If the parent wanted to complain about locking out open source, he should not have mentioned an open source bootloader in the first place.

Just make sure you have the latest version and play around with the variables and you should be fine. I've only tried u-boot straight from Marvell, not from http://www.denx.de/wiki/U-Boot

When it comes to hard RT extension (even in userland), I tend to prefer Xenomai over RTAI. Xenomai has better non-x86 support (ARM is there), nifty so-called skin support for legacy API's (VxWorks, uITRON, ..), and very good community.

Talking about distro, ELDK is best what comes to mind. This is industrial grade software, free as in beer and speech, but with commercial support if needed. The toolchain is excellent. What goes into the flash image must be hand-picked because only you know the necessary stuff.

If you are in D/A A/D business, then have a look at Comedi, it is also RT enabled by the comedi-rtdm project.

All these tools/projects are used and backed by industry. I'm a simple user of these tools, and they make my day life happy.

1. You're gonna need multiple Linux flavors and versions from multiple sources that specialized in these platforms.
   
   • ALPHA
     
   • ARM
     
   • I686
     
   • IA64
     
   • M68K
     
   • PowerPC PenguiPPC Denx
     
   • MIPS
     
   • S390
     
   • SuperH
     
   • UltraSPARC
     
   • X86_64
     
   
   
2. To determine which versions of crosstool (compiler, linkers, debugger), check out The Matrix Guy (Dan Kegel), or more specifically THE MATRIX of workable gcc/g++/ld/gdb.
   
3. To ease your pain of figuring out the "./configure" options, definitely checkout PTXDist. Menuconfig is similar to Linux 'make menuconfig'. PTXDist also help to build a root file system in a jiffy, which in my book, is a PLUS!
   

Concidering that there are at least two different Commercial operations that have created a pared down version of linux for use as an embedded os saying that linux is to large to be worth using as an embedded os shows that you are really suffering from bad management decision making.

http://www.pt.com/products/nexusware.html [NexusWare(TM) Linux-Based Software Suite]

http://www.uclinux.org/ [Embedded Linux/Microcontroller Project]

http://www.denx.de/wiki/bin/view/DULG/ELDK [Embedded Linux Development Kit ]

http://www.mentor.com/products/embedded_software/ [ Mentor Graphics site ]

the last one above might actually be of use in your particular case, being embedded graphics applications specialised they may have something for your current device to improve the performance.

If you are using a normal distro on a device with extremely limited resources, then you would naturally have a very unreliable or slow device. If you are using linux on a excellent system, and are doing video compositing / editing work, then it may be that the particular application isn't as effective as it could be.

Cinelerra is an Adobe Premiere type of tool, but it's requirements for hardware are extremely high.
[ I don't have the hardware that can run it..dual opteron 275s with 4 x 1 Gb Registered pc3200 ram and 500 Gb hard drive is minimal ]

It's rue that in the case of Movie and Television needs linux is serioulsly lacking in the software to even support the needs. The options are there, if you have the time to find them, but the number of options is far less than with windows or mac systems.

...which is wrong : http://denx.de/

I would be wary of going into 2.6 over 2.4 kernel for low-power application such as a cell phone.

Check out the Linux v2.4 vs. Linux v2.6

Same here.

I joined a team working on functionality running on an embedded Linux distribution about a year ago. After doing major cleanup in the sources, including an upgrade to the newest release of the embedded distribution; I started looking under the hood.

Several portions of the distributions were replaced by busybox, uclibc and a gcc-3.4 based toolchain. In the process, we built our own Perl based build system (with CVS): we check in/out only the modified files (basically only platform files) and use the original tarballs (tar xkfj).

As a result, we were able to decrease the embedded compressed filesystem to less than 33%, our code is much closer to the upstream developments (e.g. for network drivers, this can be an issue) and our system is modular and flexible. (btw, size does matter in production and for field upgrades): smaller, faster and cleaner...

I am currently in the process of cleaning up the platform dependent files for release and inclusion into the upstream projects (hopefully they get accepted).

We moved away and have not looked back and saved over 25,000 Euros per year (and rising) in the process. Yes, the embedded distributions are terribly expensive. If you have money to spare, consider hiring teams from the companies selling expertise and releasing the code like http://www.denx.de/, http://www.codepoet.org/, http://www.pengutronix.de/, http://www.mind.be/, ...

The G3/G4, Power4 etc. belong to the PowerPC (PPC) family of CPUs. Of course, we all know this.

However, few participating in the discussion seem to acknowledge, that there is more systems running PPC than Apple's Macs.

PPC is important in the embedded market. It has a high performance, stays relatively cool There are 'computers on a card' (a PCI card with a G3/G4 on it plus memory). They communicate over TCP/IP (or proprietary protocols) over the PCI bus with the host system. Nice if you want to have a mini cluster, a physical firewall, or whatever...

• CPCI-680 Sentinel PCI G4 card
• The CPCI 6750
• CompactPCI SBC: CPCI 3750
• Then there is the Micro Server-S from Mai Logic Mai Logic also offers evaluation boards for PowerPC but at prices, that make them interesting only for developers/companies.
• This one has been announced (German text)a year ago or so but not yet been sold. It is based on the Pegasos below.
• A search on Google for embedded PPCresults in approx. 27.000 hits one being this

Then we have several (Micro)ATX mobos, some even for dual G4 (SMP). They get used mostly in the industry, however, this year will see two new home/office-desktop G3/G4 systems that have nothing in common with Apple. See here:

• AmigaONE
• and
• Pegasos G3/G4 MicroATX mobo (SMP option)
• Another project, that at least is in planning is here (RioRed, SMP option)
• Then there is (was?) the OpenPPC project.

So it is obvious that RedHat, being focussed more on industry/server markets than on hte Desktop (that is their current goal as far as I am informed) has some interest in supporting PPC development. Altivec is a very good instruction set and having optimizations for it will be a great benefit. Altivec is not only for MultiMedia, btw. !

Theoretically, all these systems could run LinuxPPC !

Personally I am happy to see some major resource supporting the PowerPC since I would prefer a PPC machine far more than the archaical, outlived, patched & hacked i86 platform (can you use all your PCI slots without clashes...? I can't and my MoBo is from April last year...) Also the PPCs keep quite cool, meaning one could live without an active fan, unlike the Athlon hair-driers...;-)

For the enhusiasts: There are at least two other desktop (!) OS in the works, which are PPC native and come with SMP support: MorphOS (in the works since three years or more) and AmigaOS4.x