The dominant OS on these lightweights is Linux!

[Charles Steinkuehler]

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David Nicol wrote:
| On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 11:45 AM, Charles Steinkuehler
|> the 'invisible' stuff on the factory floor,
|>  inside your smart-switch, NAS box, firewall/AP, combat 'bot, etc. is
|>  converging on linux, with the UI driven stuff not far behind.
|
| is picoBSD in there fighting, or quickly becoming an academic also-ran?

I haven't seen any trade noise about picoBSD, but *LOTS* of stuff about
linux.  A quick search at embedded.com for picoBSD and linux yields no
results for picoBSD, but 1447 for linux, so I'd say academic also-ran
for picoBSD.  A search for plain BSD, however, yields 39 hits, but OS-9
gets 14, and even uCOS and RTEMS got 9 each.  A bunch of the BSD hits
were also of the form: "<embedded-OS> get BSD Sockets interface".  :)

Note that these numbers are not totally (or perhaps even remotely)
accurate...folks using bsd are probably doing so because they don't want
to deal with the licensing issues of linux (ie: kind of why Microsoft
pilfered the BSD network stack, *NOT* the linux one...plus at the time
the BSD stack still kicked linux's butt in networking :), so there's
likely a fair amount of embedded BSD work going on that never sees the
light of day.

BTW:  For those not familiar with it, RTEMS started life as the
cruise-missile real-time OS paid for by your government with your tax
money (I'm assuming you're a US citizen).  As appropriate for a public
expenditure, this software is now available for use by the unwashed
public masses...just don't tell the terrorists.  :)

First:
RTEMS = Real-Time Executive for Missile Systems

...then:
RTEMS = Real-Time Executive for Military Systems

...today:
RTEMS = Real-Time Executive for Multiprocessor Systems

Kind of like how NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) morphed into MRI
(Magnetic Resonance Imaging)...

- --
Charles Steinkuehler
charles at steinkuehler.net
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