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(OLD) Slackware, Red Hat 8, Mandrake 8,
(CURRENTLY) Ubuntu on desktops, MontaVista on my embedded systems.

Yes... MontaVista. NO, not Windows Vista, which was a turd. MontaVista really should have sued Microsoft for soiling their good name. http://www.mvista.com/

"Meanwhile, MontaVista added that it protects its customers from technical and legal risks through warranties on all editions of MontaVista Linux and indemnification against claims involving the code it creates and delivers."

You're comparing apples and oranges. As best I can tell, MontaVista's indemnification only extends as far as GPL disputes in which MontaVista is at fault, not software patent claims or even GPL disputes in which an upstream contributor screwed up. From this page:

Legal risk - reduces legal risk by providing indemnification from open source licensing issues
...
Reduce legal risk - MontaVista indemnifies all active subscribers. This means that in the case of a GPL dispute where MontaVista is at fault, then MontaVista and not the MontaVista licensee, will bear the legal and financial burden.

Microsoft is offering a lot more than MontaVista. GPL disputes are rare; patent suits or the threat thereof are comparatively common (~3000 suits per year, although only a fraction of those are software-related).

Is Linux capable of professional quality sound without glitching and problems? Absolutely! We already see Linux audio systems go hand in hand in the embeded market, and mobiles aside, even 100% rock solid pro gear like synthesisers. http://www.mvista.com/download/case_study_MontaVista_Linux_and_Yamaha.pdf Unfortunately for Linux until a reliable standard is settled upon that encourages the big boys to play, the Linux audio issues will continue. Who wants to assist a small market that cannot settle on a singular framework?

http://mvista.com/blogs/jefro/2009/09/29/latitude-on-launched-today/

Full disclosure: I work for MontaVista, worked in this project, and wrote the above-linked blog posting.

Because Linux is further along with the embedded support because a few key vendors fixed it up a while ago. Also there are no companies like MontaVista selling BSD based embedded distros.

A few companies have a large in-house staff to maintain their own custom version of BSD (I believe Juniper Networks uses a heavily modified FreeBSD (called JunOS) on most of their routers and appliances).

From a license stand point, using BSD seems far less complicated than GPL for a business, so I'm also surprised it's not a more popular solution. I have dealt with reviewing open source packages with legal departments to wrangle all the GPL linking issues several times before, and I found it to be a fairly tedious process. But I have also dealt with licensing and contracts for closed source products and sometimes those can be a nightmare as well. You wait many weeks for lawyers, sales reps and executives to duke it out over price before you can see any code at all. Developers end up losing time because they can't even start until they have some code in their hot little hands. Often there is trouble answering basic architectural decisions until the closed source packages can be taken for a test run. This causes further delays.

In comparison to some commercial software licesing, GPL is very easy, as long as you are willing to isolate your proprietary bits and share the rest of your system with the world.

Yeah, you could program most stuff on DOS. And put up with incompatible and glitchy graphics libraries just to have that arrow cursor and some minimal widgets for your app. You could write your own interrupt-based thread simulation, 'cause DOS didn't come with any support for that. And write your own spinlock semaphores at that, and wonder why your app deadlocks. You could still do your own pointer arithmetic to put up with 16 bit addressing in a world of gigabyte-sized data sets, and do your own shitty XMS/EMS block copying just to address more than 640 KB. You could even reimplement most of the network protocols and half the other libraries, because nobody else ported those libraries to DOS. Etc.

At least come up with a realistic implementation that someone would do. Such as implementing medical systems ontop of MontaVista or Lynuxworks and the problems you would have on those compared to doing it on Windows.

Right now, your 'argument' is just fluff to me.

Yeah, you could do that, just to willy-wave about your app not needing a full-featured OS at all.

I'm pretty sure people said 'bloat' not 'not needing a full-featured OS'. The systems I have mentioned are fully featured.

There are worst-time patches and CPU binding patches for Linux. Not only that, but many embedded applications are not, in fact, in need of an RTOS at all. Linux won't displace QNX, LynxOS, and VxWorks completely, but to say it's not making gains in the embedded space is either disingenuous or ignorant of the facts.

It'd also be pretty big news to, for example, MontaVista, Nokia, Cisco, and the BlueCat folks that embedded Linux isn't making any sales.

"Speaking of which, there is now a Linux distro called "Vista." Maybe Linux "Vista" will get all kinds of press as well."

I think you must mean MontaVista Linux... http://www.mvista.com/ ...and it is nothing that new. I have been using MontaVista for several years now on commercial broadcast video servers. They have been around a lot longer than Microsoft Windows Vista... in fact, I believe they have been around longer than Windows 98.

Sounds like bad news for Montavista. http://www.mvista.com/ Intel has had a partnership w/ Montavista for several years now, and this is really their Bailiwick.

Montavista hired spammers to send their ad. Not nice. They didn't even reply to the developer who complained in LKML.

Th embedded space (cell phones etc) is a growing area and by now I would expect that some individual embedded "distros" like those from http://www.mvista.com/ have a lot more installs (counting every mvista-based cell phone etc as an "installation").

1. Zenoss
2. Qumranet
3. rPath
4. Simula Lab
5. MontaVista Software
6. SugarCRM
7. OpenAir
8. Themis Computer
9. Scalix
10. Incumbents and Dealmakers (non-entry)

To properly build executables for the Linux/ARM target platform, a Linux/i386 build platform must meet the following requirements:

        * Red Hat Linux distribution version 7.2 - 9.0
        * Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE(TM)) Development Kit (JDK(TM)) version 1.4.2
        * GNU Make version 3.79.1 or later
        * GNU Cross Compiler (GCC) 3.4.6 or later
        * Doxygen version 1.4.1
        * Development Kit for the Java Card(TM) Platform 2.2.1

To set up the Linux/i386 build environment, you must do the following things:

        * Acquire Monta Vista Developer Tools
        * Set Linux platform environment variables

Acquiring Monta Vista Developer Tools

To build phoneME Feature software for the Linux/ARM (P2 board) target platform, you must acquire the MontaVista CEE 3.1 ADK developer tools.

MontaVista Linux. I work for a large networking company that uses this as the embedded OS in our switches - it is very reliable. It's not free, however, but this distro is used in several industries and by many other successful companies. They also provide good support. Here's a list of boards and platforms supported by MontaVista. Hope this helps you.

MontaVista Linux. I work for a large networking company that uses this as the embedded OS in our switches - it is very reliable. It's not free, however, but this distro is used in several industries and by many other successful companies. They also provide good support. Here's a list of boards and platforms supported by MontaVista. Hope this helps you.

MontaVista Linux. I work for a large networking company that uses this as the embedded OS in our switches - it is very reliable. It's not free, however, but this distro is used in several industries and by many other successful companies. They also provide good support. Here's a list of boards and platforms supported by MontaVista. Hope this helps you.

Most likely, it's not a GPL violation. There are several instances of proprietary "linux" kernels out there. Monta Vista being a prime example. They call it linux but in reality, the Glibc and many other core portions have been redeveloped from scratch with a focus on size, stability, and the etherial "Carrier Grade Linux" Standard. You then compile a kernel source using the new libraries and voila... proprietary kernel. It's not that they have taken the linux kernel and won't relase the source. To the contrary, they more than happily point you at kernel.org. All that is truely propietary are the libraries with which the kernel is built.

I bought a Netgear access point earlier this year that contained a printed copy of the GPL. The AP's firmware is some version of MontaVista Linux, or something like that.

It remains to be seen what effect this will have on the GStreamer community, as cheap DaVinci hardware may never find its way into hackers' hands.

What do you mean by cheap hardware? Do you mean fully designed, implemented and commercially available set top boxes, HUDs, etc. or the DaVinci DSPs themselves. The processor is tentatively priced in the $40-50 range for quantities of 1,000. For less than a few hundred bucks you should be able to design a prototype using said processor. If the DaVinci modified GStreamer source code is released (as it should according to the GPL) then it may not be all that expensive money wise for the dedicated hacker. This sounds like a great project to bring open-source hardware (i.e., opencores.org) and open-source software communities together. Of course, the time investment will be expensive, but it shouldn't be overly difficult to develop open source codecs such as OGG-Vorbis to plug in to GStreamer for the DaVinci hardware.

Even the evaluation modules and the development kit aren't too pricey for serious development. For under $15,000 you have everything needed for development. Plus, both versions of the development kit come with MontaVista Linux Professional Edition packaged with them. While that may be too expensive for the average hacker, it's not completely unfeasible to see a development based on the architecture pop up in the open community.

Having an open source starting point such as GStreamer available definitely boosts the feasibility of an open-source hardware and software Tivo-killer, DVR or other set-top box.

Go with MontaVista. You'll have to pay for it, but their Linux is used in many industries and by many large, successful, corporations. It's solid, and they have good support.

Here's a list of boards/platforms supported by MontaVista Linux.

Go with MontaVista. You'll have to pay for it, but their Linux is used in many industries and by many large, successful, corporations. It's solid, and they have good support.

Here's a list of boards/platforms supported by MontaVista Linux.

Go with MontaVista. You'll have to pay for it, but their Linux is used in many industries and by many large, successful, corporations. It's solid, and they have good support.

Here's a list of boards/platforms supported by MontaVista Linux.

Er, unless there's a Uruguayan Linux distribution of which I am currently unaware, I think that should be MontaVista Linux.

what about a complete embedded linux distribution for x86. Just think how much faster your system would become.

This has already been modded as a troll, but giving you the benefit of the doubt, do you mean something different from things like Monta Vista or Lynuxworks ?

Of course, it's also worth mentioning that "real time" doesn't necessarily mean "fast." In fact, rather the opposite is typically true: a real-time system must (by nature) make the worst case predictable -- but often compromises the average performance to do so.

--
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.

There are at least some linux powered smartphones:

Montavista powered Smartphones.

Most of them are available in Asia only. But at least the A780 is coming to Europe soon. Hooray.

But Motorola only encourages to develop in Java, not C. It would be possible to port over all the apps from openembedded, cause it uses the same CPU and a comparable environment (qt/embedded ontop of a Linux kernel) like the Zaurus. But without support fomr Motorola this is diffcult at least. You even need a hack to access the phone via ssh ...

Bye egghat.

... are M$ being particularly blatant this time? Surely they have heard of Montevista Linux before now? For the simple reason it is fast becoming one of the most popular embedded OS's thanks to it implementations with TomTom's GO GPS product., which over here in the UK is soaring in popularity. Are they perhaps going to try and cloud the issue with releasing embedded Windows Vista and hope to profit from the confusion?

Ok ok Maybe it is a little paranoid, but better be paranoid cause you never know who is watching you.

Tim,

You may want to take a look at MontaVista's real-time Linux offerings (http://www.mvista.com./ I was the technical lead for a real-time Java controller core that ran atop Hard Hat Linux and implemented both BACNet and Profibus (via Applicom dedicated I/O cards) for building automation and industrial robots, respectively.

I sold the rights to the software to the oil drilling equipment company that implemented the industrial robots but I'll be happy to assist if you want to discuss. You can find me as pr3d4t0r in irc.freenode.net ##java or chupacabra in Undernet #java.

Here is an old page describing some of the stuff that we did: http://web.archive.org/web/20010302021846/http://c ime.net/

I'll be a speaker at the Java in Action conference in Orlando this coming October; one of the sessions will talk about recent work I made in embedded/mobile/full-automation stuff. Most of my work is now based on Linux with some OS X, Solaris, and QNX to spice things up (I now work full-time for someone else; got tired of the startup game...)

Cheers and good luck,

E

Any chance this would run other distributions like Debian, or maybe even a *BSD like NetBSD (I do know that OpenBSD runs on the PalmOne Treo 600)? I looked at the product section of MontaVista Software and it seems to be a commercial distribution with no "community edition." The only thing close to free as in beer is the free preview kit I wonder if it would be possible to apply their source packages to come up with a free (as in beer as well as speech) distribution, like CentOS did with RedHat Enterprise Linux. Does this already exist? I realize distribution maintainers need to eat, but I think the pricing model of Xandros would be better, if not a distribution like Debian or Slackware. OTOH, I see some Debian packages for cell phones here., and there is a page for *BSD on mobile devices (cell phones, PDA, laptops) here.

Any chance this would run other distributions like Debian, or maybe even a *BSD like NetBSD (I do know that OpenBSD runs on the PalmOne Treo 600)? I looked at the product section of MontaVista Software and it seems to be a commercial distribution with no "community edition." The only thing close to free as in beer is the free preview kit I wonder if it would be possible to apply their source packages to come up with a free (as in beer as well as speech) distribution, like CentOS did with RedHat Enterprise Linux. Does this already exist? I realize distribution maintainers need to eat, but I think the pricing model of Xandros would be better, if not a distribution like Debian or Slackware. OTOH, I see some Debian packages for cell phones here., and there is a page for *BSD on mobile devices (cell phones, PDA, laptops) here.

Motorola uses montavista linux.

From my experirence, Au1500 (400 MHz) it is probably 10 times slowed than a 1GHz Athlon.

The gotcha' is that it does not have a FPU and all floating point operations are emulated in an interrupt handler. So any audio or video encoding floats will take forever (way longer than real time). Porting it to fixed point will make things moving.

BTW, Monta Vista has a decent Linux 2.4 port for this setup: http://www.mvista.com/products/boards.html#mips. And no, I do not work them and I don't sell any of the above products.

Your assumption that there are plenty of other profitable open source companies is wrong.

Timesys. MontaVista Software. Trolltech. SuSE. IBM's Linux ventures.

My current employer uses and contributes to open source software, although we're a proprietary software company -- using OSS tools for infrastructure functions saves us money, and contributing back reduces our software maintenance costs. My last employer is a member of the above list. They survived the bust, and I've heard rumors that they've started turning a profit.

Coming from this background, I didn't find this article suprising at all. There's plenty of money in OSS, as long as you're smart about making it.

Do you mean MontaVista, LynuxWorks, Metroworks, or some other company?

Each company should be in charge of auditing, testing and validating its products. It should also be noted that embedded realtime Linux distributions are much smaller than regular desktop/server distributions. Most DOD systems aren't accessible over a network, so that type of vulnerability is largely not a problem.

BTW, this complaint from Dowd is old news - it first surfaced this spring. Not many are buying his argument, from what I can tell.

I've been researching chipsets for digital TV. Here are my links to current hardware products:

STMicroelectronics System on Chip (2) Get Linux here
ATI Xilleon 220 (Products)
Sigma Designs Digital Media Processors (Products)
IBM PowerPC405 STBxx (Zarlink [2], Araneo)
Texas Instruments DM642 DSP (i3 Mood Box , X-Designs Flikit + Softier MediaLinux)
NEC EMMArchitecture2 (Galaxis + LinuxTV , PRISMIQ + Linux)
Equator Technologies BSP-15 boards
Via CN400 (Mini-ITX Board), PM800 and PM880 (w/ HDTV for Pentium 4) , ShowShifter HMN, Soyo Multimedia Ready Motherboard (with TV Tuner, $129.99)
Toshiba TX System RISC (MontaVista Linux)
Windows chipsets:
Intel 815 VisionPlus terrestrial box (Korean OEM)
AMD Geode (CoCom)
ARM (Samsung, etc.)
Digeo X-Stream (Paul Allen company)

MontaVista has announced that it runs their Linux, so technically it should be able to run arbitrary Linux stuff. But information on how to download applications and on applications that are hooked up to the phone's buttons and display might also be needed... If it does run Qtopia then there are a lot of Qtopia applications available.

The main thing Linux adds to this cell phone is an extra two meg footprint for that massive kernel. That means more flash is required, say $7 more in cost, which probably means the phone retails for $15-20 more than it could have. Multiply by hundreds of thousands of units, and it's it's millions of dollars that users had to spend for their "free" OS.

By contrast, I know of a commercial RTOS that takes up a minimum of 2.5 K (yes, K, not M) for the kernel. The full-up configuration with a TCP stack is 5% of the size MontaVista claims. And it barely costs five figures for a royalty-free source code license, which you'd recoup on the hardware before you were done cranking out prototypes and samples.

That's some mighty expensive beer Motorola is drinking.

...like Mitsubishi's Wakamura.

Hey, Montavista's hiring...

...like Mitsubishi's Wakamura.

Hey, Montavista's hiring...

Volvo take the decision...and was not RedHat nor SuSe...it was Montavista

China is endorsing linux and make most of the world's mobile phones (and will make most of the other embedded devices). No, we probably won't see Chinese boxed sets of linux at Best Buy, but linux imports will threaten MS.

Even if that were somehow unfair (which is a stretch) what makes you think the chief beneficiary of that won't be Montavista, the leading supplier of embedded Linux solutions? (i.e., a U.S. company.)

FWIW, I used to work at MontaVista. I'm still kind of fond of the product we made.

Product schoduct! The cartoon-like picture of tux with a hard hat on--now there was something neat! ;-D I drooled over Hard Hat Linux too, cduffy. In fact, I'm sorry I neglected to mention and link it. :-| Monta Vista Products here

I would talk to the fine people at Motavista as they deal with this everyday. I think they also may know some lawyers who are educated on this issue. If your doing embedded they can also be really useful there too :) (Note, I don't work for Montavista)

Motorola makes reference motherboards and pre-built systems based on them. You can run MontaVista Linux on them. There's a dual-1GHz model available.

I haven't tried it myself. I suspect it's not cheaper than buying a Mac.

You mentioned one application that uses Linux. There are probably many more that work under Windows, because that's probably what companies are developing for.

No, not in the telephony market.

Solaris has lots of penetration there, as did SCO and as do lots of little proprietary real-time operating systems. Windows? Not hardly.

Linux is a fairly natural choice if it can meet the reliability requirements; quite a bit of money and engineering time is being put into just that. My former employer, MontaVista Software, has a high availability add-on to their embedded Linux distribution; this add-on is aimed at folks in markets just like this one. Hopefully in a few years efforts such as theirs will make Linux a strong competitor in markets, such as this, requiring extreme reliability. (No, Linux is not "extremely reliable" -- not in a market where it's not unusual to have two or more completely independant hot-swappable CPUs sharing a backplane).

Your nice, stock little "are the applications there?" answer is useful in 99% of all relevant situations -- but the telephony market (and most particularly the embedded telephony market) isn't Yet Another Area where Windows is used by most of the computing world. Neither Microsoft nor the Linux vendors have a strong foothold there. Likewise, where the "Linux desktop" was a few years ago was utterly irrelevant to telephony applications, because the desktop has nothing to do with telephony -- and nobody even pretends that a monkey with a MCSE can configure or administer a heavy-duty PBX system.

Mind you, I'm not a telephony engineer. I'm just some guy who worked at a damned good embedded systems house for a while and got a chance to see some of the hardware and software needs the telephony folks have, and appreciate exactly how serious they are about their uptime. The desktop? They don't care about the desktop. They care about reliability -- really, really heavy-duty serious reliability. Linux doesn't really have it yet, and Windows sure as hell doesn't. But we're working on it.

It's not as if the suggestion is being made that this fellow quit his present job immediately and job hunt full-time until he finds somewhere with a more enlightened attitude -- merely that he switch; this can (easily) mean finding a new employer, and only then resigning from his present position. Unless his family is particularly large, or he's financially prevented from moving (ie. making payments on a house, unable to cover rent elsewhere in addition), one can still reasonably switch jobs presuming good pay and coverage of relocation expenses.

Working at an open source company is extremely rewarding -- I can say this having been employed by one for three years now. Some of my coworkers signed up because of the ability to work on OSS and get paid; others signed up for more conventional reasons. As for my coworkers, they're almost uniformly brilliant at what they do; the engineering group includes big-name kernel hacks and has highly clued management -- and it's well worth noting that at least some of the best of them (the engineers, not the management) signed up specifically because of the opportunity to be paid for working on open source (even better, in at least one case, on a tree which they already maintained).

Good pay is nice. Good pay in a place with brilliant co-workers and fun projects (which OSS-based companies are more likely than average to be) is nicer. What better than to be given money to do full time what you already do in your spare time?!

However, just so people don't think it's just a Linux thing... Annasoft, a leading Microsoft embedded partner, just died.

It actually runs linux, check on Montavista's site... they have the Linux LSP available for download for Alchemy's (sorry... AMD) au1000 which is the ancestor (just no lcd/sd controller, a little more power hungry) of the au1100. But you'd rather use Alchemy's au1500 which has a pci bus controller i guess...

What of embedded systems? For a long time, there've been folks making money off having the dominant embedded systems OS be proprietary. Nonetheless, some open source companies are making an impact. (I work for MVista, btw, and so am more than a bit biased on the subject). There've been folks for a long time who've seen money in operating systems for routers, set-top boxes and PDAs, yet there are companies using Linux for all of these purposes.

The point I'm trying to make is that while there may be money to be made doing the proprietary thing, if going to open source drives your costs and development time down sufficiently (and it drives them down pretty darned far!), it can still be the most profitable thing to do in the long run. Maintaining your own OS and development tools is expensive; use OSS for your base (and outsource all the parts that only support your application) and focus on whatever distinguishes your product, and you can get more done faster -- and that's good for the bottom line.

Montavista, the original creators of the preempt patch, and who basically released it back into the wild for the community to work on, just got quite a bit of money in a new round of financing. Pretty impressive given the current economic conditions here in the US.

And please, no "nice link buddy, like I couldn't have figured out the Montavista URL on my own" comments... it's just there for convenience ;)

Montavista, the original creators of the preempt patch, and who basically released it back into the wild for the community to work on, just got quite a bit of money in a new round of financing. Pretty impressive given the current economic conditions here in the US.

And please, no "nice link buddy, like I couldn't have figured out the Montavista URL on my own" comments... it's just there for convenience ;)