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Wind River Partners With Red Hat On Embedded Linux
An anonymous reader writes "According to LinuxDevices: 'Calling embedded Linux and VxWorks 'the standards in device software development,' Wind River today announced a dual operating system strategy that adds a newly developed embedded Linux distribution -- Red Hat Embedded Linux -- alongside its proprietary VxWorks real-time operating system.'"
What happened to BSD? It wasn't that long ago that Wind River announced that BSD was the wave of the future.
Apart from ease of porting preexisting applications, does embedded Linux have any advantages whatsoever over say QNX or TRON?
Redhat hasn't dropped the desktop. If anything, it's stronger on the desktop now that it's called Fedora because it's managed by the community. The sky's the limit man. :)
Life is offtopic.
My boss likes to say things about "The Standards". In her worldview, anything is the best choice for any given situation if it's "The Industry Standard". That phrase is practically sacred to her. The only reason we're not running Windows (her favourite OS) on our servers is because in her perception, "The Industry Standard" for large Web sites is Solaris on SPARC hardware. But the instant her businessperson friends start saying how wonderful Win2K3 on Compaq servers is, she'll probably be listing our Sun Enterprise servers on eBay...
After so many years in the tech field, I'm starting to get really really wary of people who say such glowing things about "The Standards". It seems to be a thinly-veiled way of saying "What Everybody Else Is Doing". In the 1800s, "The Standard" way of life for a wealthy white Southerner in the US would include the ownership of slaves. And "The Standard" in industrialised Western nations was, of course, for women (and blacks) to not have the right to vote.
The point of my little screed is-- if the best defence a company has for their products/services/actions/lack of actions is that they are "the standard"... well, it either shows a severe lack of imagination, or an adherence to "this is today's fad; tomorrow, the fad may be different" mentality. The same sort of mentality that hardcore gamers demonstrate, when one year they get the WhizBang(R) CyberWhatever(TM) 3000 AGP card with 128MB of RAM and are all "wow, look at me", and the next year, they wouldn't be caught dead with anything less than a WhizBang(R) CyberWhatever(TM) Pro 5000 AGP card with 256MB of RAM... Because, I mean, the Pro 5000 is "The Standard" now, and anyone with less is "obviously a limpdicked little fagot" (sic). (End sarcasm)...
Companies that speak of "The Standard", to me, reek of rat-race-ism, and-- to be frank-- of pure faddishness. Remember: "The Standard" == "What everyone else is doing". And "everyone else" is running Windows on their x86 hardware, and we all know how sterling an example of quality engineering either of those things are... (no flames, please)
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
First they "acquired" Slackware. And then sold it off/gave it away after doing nothing with it. Then they "acquired" BSD and have done little with it. Now they have linked up with RedHat for embedded Linux tools?
When WindRiver Systems (WRS) came in several years ago to give a presentation on their strategies for Tornado and VxWorks products we were disappointed. After two hours of the pain and agony of learning nothing we didn't already know, we asked "where's the beef"? (old expression, but I think you "get it") They told us their entire strategy was to become a $1BILLION company inside of a year. Some strategy, eh?
Our experience is that WRS provides marginal support on the VxWorks products, and have made a mess of their licensing systems and servers (that track tools use and enforce their payment structures). Let's hope WRS doesn't take away from the strength of the Open Source community, the tools development it undertakes, and the great support it gives...
In the past 5 r so years, Wind River has announce grand "startegic aliances" with everyone (with the possible exception of M$) that has ahd there 30 seconds of fame. I even rember back whne they sold a C compiler for various early *NIX machines on teh 70's. I suppose they do OK, but they are certainly not great "geussers of teh future direction" of things!
nix is very simple, but it takes a genius to understand the simplicity. (Dennis Ritchie) ~
Try using ext2 et al on a flash file system.
You only get 100,000 writes on an flash chip. You need a strategy for minimizing writes. No general purpose file system made for a hard disk is going to do that optimally.
In any event, the type of glitch they had on the rover wasn't an obvious file system bug. It was more one of those confluence of supposedly normally handleable events that in concert with each other make for a bad situation.
Well my experience with Wind River was when they bought pSOS, they quickly terminated them as they were their biggest RTOS competitor at the time.
People say that Microsoft are anti competitive well Wind River certainly know how to destroy the competition.....don't be fooled by this Linux purchase Red Hat Embedded Linux will be disolved into VxWorks.
Wind River RTOS licenses cost the earth and their technical support isn't that great.
The large company I work for recently dumped VxWorks for Linux. WR support wasn't just bad, it was positively sleazy. We begged them for help with a serious bug and they were completely unhelpful, dening any responsibility. When we finally were able to *prove* that the problem was theirs they admitted that it was a known problem!