Embedded OS

[Eric S. Raymond]

Hal Murray <hmurray at megapathdsl.net>:
> 
> > However, the Go developers have stated that this is one of their major aims,
> > and it is easy to believe they will be funded to do this because the
> > business case for moving a lot of Google's Android devevelopment is *quite*
> > clear. 
> 
> I thought Android is/was derived from Linux.  Has it diverged enough to be 
> called an embedded OS?

:-)

A *lot* of "embedded OS" is stripped down and repackaged Linux these
days - not just on smartphones.  The economics of this are
interesting; older OSs like VRTX that ran on PICs and the like have
been in very rapid decline over the last decade not because of changes
in hardware costs - the PICS still have a significant BOM advantage at
large volumes -  but because finding people who can program in those
older environments has been getting difficult.

That is, a lot of the design wins that chips like the ARM32 have been
getting are for deployments where a PIC running a traditional,
pre-Linux embedded OS would be quite-sufficient and cheaper - only you
can't get that software development done any more without chasing down
one of a small coterie of increasingly elderly and very expensive
wizards.

Have you met Dave Taht?  He was an early dev at one of the companies
that cracked this space open for Linux.  He has a lot of funny and
occasionally disquieting stories about how this particular technology
transition went down.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

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