Windows XP Embedded

Embedded Geek writes: "Embedded Systems Programming has a piece about Microsoft organizing its employees to advocate their embedded products in online newsgroups (part of "a new culture at Microsoft" making "an effort to shed the company's reputation as an incommunicative giant.") This is coordinated with Microsoft's launch of Windows XP Embedded at their Embedded Developers' Conference (the countdown clock on their homepage says Wednesday but the launch party is Thursday)." News.com notes that this will be used in slot machines and ATMs. Insert obligatory free-money joke.

Comments

they have no chance

[Lumpy]

Embedded means small and fast, both of which cannot be done with Windows CE,Embedded NT, Embedded XP.

This is why 60% of all embedded systems are DOS and then Linux (The linux side is growing fast.... and I mean really fast) and then specalized.

If Microsoft can demonstrate a single floppy version of XP that needs only 4 meg of ram or less to run and leave room for my app then I'll take them serious.

Until then Microsoft products are not looked at as a serious alternative or solution, they are too expensive to impliment in the hardware requirements.

Microsoft invents Customer Feedback

[s20451]

That perception, Microsoft says, is precisely why everyone on the development team of its Talisker embedded operating system now logs hours every week, chatting about the OS in news groups, checking out "bug reports" on a dedicated Web site and meeting with users face-to-face at "plugfests," where they discuss Talisker programming experiences.

Congrats to Microsoft for inventing web based bug tracking. Truly this is a great day for software.

Linux fanatics starve...

[Zeinfeld]

...refuse to accept money fro Windows XP based ATMs...

The embedded devices market is not all about small and fast. And even where the issue is small and fast, the XP kernel may well prove to have more to offer than many UNIX designs.

There is a wide range of embedded devices, from washing machines to cars, to industrial process machinery. Until recently only a small fraction of those systems had anything as sophisticated as an operating system.

If on the other hand you want to build a next generation audio system you are likely to find that you need an O/S, you need some sort of file system to store your MP3s, you have an ethernet and possibly a WiFi interface to support, you may even support PCMCIA or compactflash. XP has major advantages in that space since you are guaranteed to have a driver available.

The bloatware charge is and always has been bogus. People don't seem to understand that the value of a 3 year old PC is $150 and so there is no particular reason why Microsoft should limit a $100/$200 O/S so that it can run under the constraints of that machine. 512Mb SIMMs are on sale these days for the price of 16Mb SIMMs a couple of years back, nobody actually makes 20Gb 3.5" disks any more, they are too small to bother with.

RAM and disk space are not constrained resources on the PC, so don't expect companies in that space to constrain them in their products. The O/S kernel is kept small because the performance of the machine depends on large parts of it being in primary or secondary cache most of the time.

The features of XP that will be much more relevant to the embedded systems space are its multi-tasking and scheduling control. I don't expect any traditional UNIX kernel to do well there, the UNIX architecture was never designed for and is simply not up to RT tasks. Thats why the RT Linux varieties have major mods to the internals to support features such as guaranteed scheduling etc.