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Which Embedded Linux Distribution?
Abhikhurana writes "I work for a company which designs a variety of video surveillance devices (such as MPEG4 video servers). Traditionally, these products have been based on proprietary OSs such as Nucleus and VxWorks. Now, we are redesigning a few of our products and I am trying to convince my company to go down the Linux route. Understandably, our management is quite skeptical about that and so I was asked by our CTO to recommend a few RTOSs which have mature networking stacks and which work well on ARM platform. I know that there are many embedded Linux based distributions out there. There are commercial ones such as Montavista, LynuxWorks, free ones such as uclinux, muLinux and some Linux like distros such as Ecos. What is the most stable and best community supported embedded Linux distribution out there?"
When it comes to hard RT extension (even in userland), I tend to prefer Xenomai over RTAI. Xenomai has better non-x86 support (ARM is there), nifty so-called skin support for legacy API's (VxWorks, uITRON, ..), and very good community.
Talking about distro, ELDK is best what comes to mind. This is industrial grade software, free as in beer and speech, but with commercial support if needed. The toolchain is excellent. What goes into the flash image must be hand-picked because only you know the necessary stuff.
If you are in D/A A/D business, then have a look at Comedi, it is also RT enabled by the comedi-rtdm project.
All these tools/projects are used and backed by industry. I'm a simple user of these tools, and they make my day life happy.
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TiVo distributes Linux every time they sell a device, and they distribute source code. The TiVo hardware has some kind of device that checks for the original unmodified TiVo software, so that their Linux device cannot accept user-made changes. This does not violate GPL v2.