Monta Vista does hold your hand [LWN.net]

Monta Vista does hold your hand

Posted May 7, 2008 14:01 UTC (Wed) by sepreece (subscriber, #19270)
In reply to: Monta Vista does hold your hand by man_ls
Parent article: How not to sell embedded Linux

Ready's comments are largely aimed at companies that build embedded products and have been
using specialized real-time OSs, but are now looking at Linux and thinking "Hmm - get rid of
those licensing costs and I could make more money per device."

Those folks are used to buying an OS from a vendor that provides support and it's reasonably
important to make sure they understand that while you don't need to license Linux, you can't
expect to use it in products without some kind of support costs - either an in-house
development OS-development team or a specialist embedded-Linux distributor.

At a previous employer we determined that using an embedded distributor (MontaVista, in fact)
cost less than it would cost to staff the work we relied on them to do.

[Aside to Jon - you make fun of "the assertion that MontaVista and Wind River are "Linux's
strongest proponents." However, the actual assertion was that they were "embedded Linux's
strongest proponents", which is a claim MV could probably make a reasonable argument for.]

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Posted May 7, 2008 14:08 UTC (Wed) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link]

I would like to see how much of mvista's code is in the mainline kernel and how much is in
their own distro kernels. Granted they have a better record than WR but it still doesn't look
like much in the grans scheme of things:


[linux-2.6.git] >git-log --pretty=format:"%ae" | wc -l
87767
[linux-2.6.git] >git-log --pretty=format:"%ae" | grep "mvista" | wc -l
569

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Posted May 7, 2008 14:21 UTC (Wed) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018) [Link]

The O(1) scheduler was developed by Robert Love while at Montavista IIRC.

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Posted May 8, 2008 21:43 UTC (Thu) by im14u2c (subscriber, #5246) [Link]

Huh? The O(1) scheduler was developed by Ingo Molnar while he was at RedHat.

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Posted May 9, 2008 7:08 UTC (Fri) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018) [Link]

http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS8778096476.html

O(1) != CONFIG_PREEMPT

Posted May 9, 2008 7:21 UTC (Fri) by im14u2c (subscriber, #5246) [Link]

I guess I missed where this is the O(1) scheduler? In fact, that press release is largely content free. It just says "It's Not RTLinux."

I think you're thinking of CONFIG_PREEMPT, not the O(1) scheduler.

Perhaps this patch (ingo-O1-sched/preempt-kernel-rml-2.4.18-rc1-ingo-K3-1.patch) is what confused you? It's Robert Love's preempt patch against Ingo Molnar's O(1) scheduler.... :-)