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Linux Gaining Support In Embedded Systems (TechWeb)
TechWeb reports on Wind River's moves toward Linux. "Linux today lacks the maturity, for example, to operate in real-time systems, which are computer systems that respond to input signals fast enough to keep an operation moving at its required speed. Such systems are used to control airplanes and space shuttles.
But while Linux is behind proprietary and homegrown systems in this space, the gap is closing."
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Linux Gaining Support In Embedded Systems (TechWeb) Posted Dec 11, 2003 18:36 UTC (Thu) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020) [Link] Not much of an article, it just takes Wind River's point of view and replays it as fact. The "lacks maturity" statement is just plain wrong. Maturity has nothing to do with real-time systems. It is the need for a hard real-time scheduler. I could say that Wind River's vxWorks (which I use daily) is immature because it doesn't have anything except a real-time scheduler. Everything in a real-time system isn't real-time. The strength of Linux is that you are not constrained to do ALL of your processing at a real-time priority.
Linux Gaining Support In Embedded Systems (TechWeb) Posted Dec 11, 2003 19:03 UTC (Thu) by erich (subscriber, #7127) [Link] Typical "embedded" Linux systems are kind of "homegrown"... the one i've seen - the SDK of Intersil for the ISL3893, which is - although mostly GPL - NOT publicly available - is based upon a fork of uclinux around late 1998.It sucks. They hacked their logging into every application, disabled features and made many many mistakes (wrong #ifdefs and such) while doing that. Instead of providing proper patches they ship ancient versions... They also did not push back their changes into uclinux, so they could be intergrated into future releases (such as hardware information that uclinux could build out-of-the-box for that hardware) And zcom, taiwanese manufcaturer further modified the kernel without releasing source... Manufacturers suck. They havn't understand Open Source, and that is why they have all these problems.
Linux Gaining Support In Embedded Systems (TechWeb) Posted Dec 12, 2003 11:28 UTC (Fri) by dps (subscriber, #5725) [Link] Unix (and almost everything else including Windows and MacOS) are not hard real time kernels and I have not seen anyone claim otherwise. Even the preemptable linus kernel is only soft to firm real time, or was last time I heard. This good enough for a lot of embedded systems, esp. things like washing machines, telephone switches, games consoles and personal video recorders.Aitrcraft, chemical plant contols and other systems alluded in the article are often characterised as hard real time--missing the deadline is a disaster. Statements about the maximum time you might spend in the kernel matter and are worth paying for in these applications. Linux is probably resistant to such statements and the official requirements that surround these applications.
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