Embedded Developers Prefer Linux, Love Android

DeviceGuru writes "In a recent EE Times 2013 Embedded Market study, Android was the OS of choice for future embedded projects among 16 percent of the survey's participants, second only to 'in-house/custom' (at 28 percent). But if a spectrum of disparate approaches can be lumped together as a single option, why not aggregate the various shades of Linux to see how they compare? Parsing the EE Times data that way makes it abundantly clear that Linux truly dominates the embedded market."

Comments

Wrong conclusions from the data

[livingboy]

If you look original EE Times link and read the article, you will see that the love for Android is dropping:

However, despite pulling ahead of FreeRTOS and Ubuntu Linux, the news is not all good for Android in embedded applications. Whereas a year before 34 percent of users thought they would be using Android during the following 12 months that percentage dropped to 28 percent in the latest survey.

After all, used OS is mostly hardware dependent, is it a low end or high end embedded platform.

Low end you do in the house, middle range applications you use some RTOS, in the high end you use those Linuxes and Android.

Disclaimer: I am currently evaluating OS that did leap from 0 to 4% in its first year of use.

Re:Wrong conclusions from the data

[Anonymous Coward]

People are mixing up two different concepts: embedded != realtime.
Of course no one confronted with critical realtime requirements will choose Android java application as a solution.

Re:Wrong conclusions from the data

[AmiMoJo]

When they say "embedded" they probably don't mean headless boxes as you appear to be thinking of. At work we recently developed such a device, a tablet PC running Windows Embedded Compact 7 with one auto-starting app.

We looked at Android. You can either disable the home button in software or just omit it from the hardware so that your app is always in the foreground. Not that you would necessarily want to; eventually we would write a custom launcher that could start other apps we provided.

Windows Embedded Compact 7 is a turd. Parts of it just don't work. We raised a support ticket with Microsoft because Portuguese language settings didn't work and their response was "it's broken, we know about it and there is no business case to fix it, and BTW a bunch of other random languages don't work either". We were planning to use Silverlight to do our UI but performance was terrible, seemingly not using hardware acceleration at all (despite OpenGL ES working perfectly well). When you start playing stereo sound the left and right channels are sometimes randomly swapped. The whole thing is a giant cluster-fuck.

Silly angle

[Gaygirlie]

A kernel all by its lonesome self doesn't really do all that much, it needs userland to become a useable OS. For example, Linux-kernel by itself would just be a Linux-kernel, nothing more, but slap uClibc and Busybox on top of it and you've suddenly got yourself a bare-bones OS. However, as the Linux-kernel is so utterly modifiable and flexible the userland can be almost anything and there is nothing about the kernel itself that somehow mandates that the userlands be in any way or form compatible with or even so much as resemble one another! So, if we are just going to slap together all the different forms of operating systems with absolutely no regard for the userland simply because their kernels are based on a similar source we should do the same for the other kernels, too, in order to be fair: slap OSX and iOS together with all the BSDs, all the Windows NT - based kernels together and so on, and then compare the numbers.

Linux, the kernel, would likely still come on top and we could all rejoice and sing Kumbaya, but... well, what would you gain at that point? What does such masturbation to the types of kernels actually give us? It says nothing about the operating systems, it says nothing about finer details like e.g. if the kernels are even compatible with one another due to modifications or anything, it's just simply a way of masturbating to the numbers.

High level embedded systems

[ultranerdz]

So many misconceptions here.

1st we can assume Android uses the kernel Linux, so android "includes" Linux.

2nd, there are many types (levels) of embedded systems. Some don't need CPU (nor software). Some require a simple microcontroller, and some require true connectivity, true multitasking, lots of RAM, and maybe an MMU. Some of these systems run OS, and some of there are Linux. Lets call those "high level" -- happen to be the ones we interact on a daily basis (like a Smartphone for example).

Said that, the great vast majority of embedded systems are not "high level", and we normally don't even "use" them directly, so they don't run Linux (nor Android).

What is true is that in general, people that need to program in high level, prefer to code in Linux (or even Android) than to code in Windows CE, bare metal, or any other Embedded OS (or RTOS out there).

But still, it will take "long time" to Linux really dominate the embedded market.