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Living in a Linux Embedded World
krow writes: "Embedded.com is running an article where the author is making some assumptions of Linux's use in the embedded markets based on the opinion of one consultant and the fact that Lineo had to lay off some people this year. It's still interesting reading though for some insight into a different world for Linux and there is a nice reference in the comments to the interview of Victor Yodaiken of RTLinux fame by by Kevin Fu on the ACM site."
Most embedded componants that I know of use an in house OS. Where I work we bought vxWorks, but we are seriously considering replacing it with something cheaper. Not linux, something we write in house. It turns out that most real time systems cannot afford the overhead of a OS. Sure we need something to deal with hardware, and schedualing, and if you have networking it is nice to have sockets are similear. In the end though, a OS gets in the way more then helps.
In our particular case we have a lot of code to jump out of interupt context and then back in every 15 seconds. That really hurts performance. (Yes, we often want to spend more then 15 seconds processing interupts, with out hardware it turns out to be a good idea, though I don't want to give away why) Of course the OS clocks get all screwed up when we do that.