The evolution of RTOSes

The evolution of RTOSes

Posted Mar 29, 2004 13:13 UTC (Mon) by alex (subscriber, #1355)
In reply to: View from the trenches: it doesn't by alonso
Parent article: Linux Kernel 2.6: the Future of Embedded Computing, Part I (Linux Journal)

It depends on what your looking for out of your OS. It seems to me a lot of the "smaller" RTOS's are gearing up to offer more and more features you find with more complete OS's like Linux. At some point you have to make a decision about when you abandon the lock-in of the proprietry OS and move to a more widely used OS.

Symbian is/was aimed squarely at he PDA/Phone market as is PocketPC/WinCE. They both offer features for resource starved GUI's and have had there share of success in that field. They are still way behind vxWorks in terms of devices shipped. vxWorks itself is being squeezed from the high end by embedded Linux where it struggles to compete to offer features without adding overly burdonsome cost.

I think the existing real-time features of stock Linux (2.6) will do for most non-critical applications. However I don't think it will be able to follow down to the very cheap devices with limited hardware resources where the microkernels still hold and advantage. However as hardware becomes more and more powerful I think the hardware will scale up to Linux's sweet point.

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