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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."
Jay Michaelson:
Virtex-II pro is an FPGA so you can't really "port to it" - though the catch is that they comes with IBM's powerPC cores embedded. Why would he mention that he ported to Virtex-II pro instead of just PowerPC architecture?
and btw, it's kind of silly to name your company after horse-radish, especially done AFTER the budwiser commercials came out (the company was founded in 2000). Well, at least it's not named after certain rich person's (lack of) manhood, so I stay thankful for that...
My life in the land of the rising sun.
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.
Uh oh. Jay Michaelson goes on to quote the GPL "that the GPL requires hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of IP to be shared, and they don't like it. It's a real concern in embedded." I can hear zealots complaining that software needs to be free, etc.
Honestly though, the BSD license does offer a great reward to users. Companies can offer back to the community and are given a choice. GPL take s the choice away from vendors. Although who knows what gets put into the code unless it's released to all.
I really hate Dan Patrick.
It was named after the Japanese spicy green pasty sushi yummy stuff, which was in turn named after the Budweiser commercials.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
In the interview they said that NetBSD can scale but does anyone have a comparision between says the locks in the linux kernel and the NetBSD kernel? I'm just intrested in how high they can both scale. I know that Linux is now running upto 64 CPU's in the shape of the SGI Altix but I have no idea how far NetBSD goes
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Don't forget the samurai daemon!
:)
Who needs a fat penguin or a yellow fish? This is the best mascot ever
Prescriptive grammar:linguistics
Wrong! I think FreeBSD has had SMP support even longer than Linux, alas it was for DEC Alpha only way back in the begining of the project.
Most Linux user make fun of GIANT, but in reality it's not much of an issue, as the system shouldn't spend time in the kernel (as it does in Linux) but actually run userland stuff, so, GIANT isn't that much of an issue on 8 or less CPU's.