Interest in Embedded Linux Remains Low

burnin1965 writes "According to EE Times interest in embedded linux remains low. I was surprised to see their headline considering I just purchased a Sony TV which runs linux and I assisted my brother in setting up an Actiontec DSL modem which runs linux. A few years back I had only heard of devices that ran embedded linux and now that they are starting show up everywhere interest is low? The survey did bring up three issues which should be addressed by the embedded linux community, whether those issues are misconceptions or actual problems. 1) Incompatibility with software, applications, and drivers. 2) Performance or real time capability. And 3) support."

Comments

Is interest low or do these devices simply work?

[DrXym]

My feeling is the latter. My Netgear ADSL modem / firewall uses embedded Linux. If not for a "debug mode" hidden in the advanced settings which enables you to SSH into a busybox shell, I wouldn't know nor care. The thing just works and it works very well. I expect millions of people are running Linux in their homes in their modems, TVs, audio / DVD players, washing machines or elsewhere and simply don't know it.

big surprise.

[nblender]

Hardware designers generally start with an eval-board of some sort so they can hack up their add-on hardware and get something running on the bench before drawing schematics on napkins and starting to do a layout. As such, they need a 'board support package'. You generally buy that from an embedded systems vendor. You generally don't just download the latest linux kernel and start porting drivers and vm maps. Your management will likely want you to get a BSP from a commercial vendor to whom they pay maintenance so your engineers can hassle them about bugs in the bootloader, etc... Your choices are limited. Generally something like Montavista, Windriver, QNX. In my experience, Montavista makes it hard to do business with them. You practically have to bribe them to talk to you in the first place; even when you're waving around PO's. You've already bought the hardware from Intel or RadiSys and now you need support for the BSP. When you finally get a price, it's $18k per seat for a GCC license, and support is $5k/year; maximum of 5 incidents.

QNX on the other hand, will practically send an engineer on site to hold your hand while you get your BSP running. Support is cheap and the runtime licenses are down in the noise threshold.

Sure, QNX has a few issues. So does VxWorks. But Linux is a real lose, and I've tried.

Frankly, if I was starting from scratch and rolling my own BSP, I'd choose NetBSD. Embedded friendly license, code purity, and it probably already has your processor arch.

Re:big surprise.

[korbin_dallas]

Yup you got it. Thats absolutely right about MontaVista, Eval Boards and licensing costs. Although I will add a few more tokens to the mix.

Another thing that happens is if your product uses DSPs, the hardware people will expect that you will not even use an embedded OS and write the application directly to hardware. As one HW engineer told me, "Its very easy, what do you mean you need a driver? When I did it it was just one line of C code (to write data to memory)." Once I pointed out we were upgrading the HW to use the 400,000 lines of code we ALREADY wrote and tested...

Our product line is just now evaluating a PPC core due to physical dimension and power problems in a new product. The other older product parts use x86 PC104 cards, not really embedded, more like tinyPC. But we rolled our own Linux OS to do the things we want.

The other thing I note, is that large companies, really do love to throw piles of money at problems.