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Interview with Jay Michaelson of Wasabi Systems
Gentu writes "The main commercial company behind NetBSD is Wasabi Systems. The company has contributed advances and big chunks of code to the open source project, while they do offer a boxed release of NetBSD. However, their main business for the company is the embedded market and NetBSD is marketed as an embedded OS. OSNews talked to the Vice President of Wasabi Systems, Jay Michaelson. Linux in the embedded market is also discussed."
Since the first three posts (not by me, I hasten to add) were all modded down to -1 in less than a minute, I'll try to post something more worthwhile.
Wasabi Systems offers three main components:
Maguro
This is their embedded kernel, using a customized NetBSD kernel with extensions designed to allow better low-power operation and lower latency for real-time applications.
Uni
This is a custom, proprietary API supplied by Wasabi Systems that provides a variety of functionality for embedded systems, including interfacing with FieldNet devices such as the Kohada2010F and Tako ABV modules.
Ika
This is another proprietary API layer from Wasabi, which allows the use of WinCE applications on their systems without recompiling, thanks to a branch of the WINE project (called SAKE) that adds compatible system calls for over 95% of WinCE library routines.
It's a wonderful company run by a bunch of great guys - I wish them all the best.
You're thinking of scaling the wrong way. They can scale the system down to have a smaller foot print (thus the whole embedded approach of the business). Last I heard, NetBSD didn't do SMP though that may have changed since the last time I played with it (a quick search on the netbsd site indicates that smp was only recently merged into -current so expecting it to scale with linux is likely out of the question...try FreeBSD for that).