Cell Phones: Don't Count Linux Out (Business Week)

Cell Phones: Don't Count Linux Out (Business Week)

Posted Sep 2, 2004 13:35 UTC (Thu) by jonth (subscriber, #4008)
In reply to: Cell Phones: Don't Count Linux Out (Business Week) by petegn
Parent article: Cell Phones: Don't Count Linux Out (Business Week)

One word: cost.

Until there's a change in this attitude that "memory (and MIPs) is cheap," Linux will never make it in this domain. I have spent 10 years doing this, and it's a constant source of frustration to me that the industry generally encourages such profligacy. We don't add memory for any other reason than we absolutely need it, because any addition costs money. The BOM on a mobile phone is less than $50 at the moment, and going down all the time. All the while, there is a constant drive on adding user features, and yet reducing cost even more.

So, if you want Linux to work in this domain, you need to make a cut down version that runs in a footprint of around 20-40KB, doesn't require a memory manager, and can guarantee a task switching latency of around 100 cycles or so.

Or (if you want OSS) use eCos.

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