Embedded Developers Prefer Linux, Love Android 104
DeviceGuru writes "In a recent EE Times 2013 Embedded Market study, Android was the OS of choice for future embedded projects among 16 percent of the survey's participants, second only to 'in-house/custom' (at 28 percent). But if a spectrum of disparate approaches can be lumped together as a single option, why not aggregate the various shades of Linux to see how they compare? Parsing the EE Times data that way makes it abundantly clear that Linux truly dominates the embedded market."
Wrong conclusions from the data (Score:5, Interesting)
If you look original EE Times link and read the article, you will see that the love for Android is dropping:
After all, used OS is mostly hardware dependent, is it a low end or high end embedded platform.
Low end you do in the house, middle range applications you use some RTOS, in the high end you use those Linuxes and Android.
Disclaimer: I am currently evaluating OS that did leap from 0 to 4% in its first year of use.
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Depends on what you consider an Operating system I guess. A basic task scheduler and process messaging could be thrown together in an afternoon, memory allocation is easy but you generally don't want it in an embedded application. The peripheral drivers is something you will have to put together regardless of OS.
It's when you need a network stack and a filesystem that you might want to pull in something that is already done.
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"A basic task scheduler and process messaging could be thrown together in an afternoon, ..."
Right, kernels are things you throw together in an afternoon. I'm sure most of them are. Bootstrapping code takes, what, 5-10 minutes?
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If it's basically an app on bare metal on fixed hardware, yes, you might throw the 'kernel' together in an afternoon if you have some parts lying around in your code library.
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I work in automotive non-UI enviroment. And I can tell you that the OS is very minimal. It hooks to a timer interrupt and executes predefined tasks based on timer. It has no memory sharing, no drivers, no filesystems. It just handles context switches.
So me knowing about it, I can tell you that yes, you can make a working OS in one afternoon.
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I can also make a working web server in an afternoon, if all it does is listen to port 80 and translate GET commands into the file system, and error out on everything else.
Re:Wrong conclusions from the data (Score:5, Insightful)
This of course is purely anecdotal and based on my consumer grade experiences. But given how eagerly Dalvik disposes of anything connected to a process that'S not in the foreground I wouldn't consider using it to do anything important. As an abstraction layer for vastly different hardware running the same crap it works quite nicely. But you shouldn't attach hydraulics, engines, valves or anything else important to it.
Also let's not forget how long it took to get Linux anywhere near equipment that needs an RT OS. And it possibly still isn't the first choice in such environments. I've been out of that loop for a long time and have been known to be wrong. So this is no engineering advice.
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I imagine they just want Android for UI design, internet and non RT peripheral interfacing ... mostly the same reasons for wanting Linux.
No need to handle things monolithically, you can always run a more predictable RTOS alongside.
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Re:Wrong conclusions from the data (Score:5, Insightful)
Engineering's job is to make what marketing want work, not argue about whether the market wants the right thing. Underneath Android is still Linux, anything that needs to avoid garbage collection can easily run outside of the dalvik VM.
Re:Wrong conclusions from the data (Score:5, Insightful)
"Engineering's job is to make what marketing want work, not argue about whether the market wants the right thing."
Complete nonsense. Granted, that's how some companies are run, but generally it is not a very successful formula.
If you want your company to be successful, it is the job of Engineering to tell Marketing what works well and what doesn't. Marketing may want something specific, but if it doesn't work well, it won't sell well either.
Apple is a good example. Engineering drives marketing as much as the other way around.
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What do you mean?
All I see is that often the engineering types have no idea what the market wants. When marketing comes and says the market want product X, it's not the job of engineering to say product Y is superior, and instruct marketing to force it on the market.
Of course, if in fact product X is infeasible due to engineering problems, then that's another problem.
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Perhaps clearer. Marketing tells engineering what the market wants. In a good organization, engineering then tells marketing what they can do to satisfy that and marketing gets to work teaching the market why that is the best solution to what they want.
In a bad organization, marketing tells engineering what to do to satisfy the market and when engineering says that can't actually be done, marketing demands it anyway.
In a terrible organization, marketing decides what they want the market to want, tells engin
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Underneath Android is still Linux, anything that needs to avoid garbage collection can easily run outside of the dalvik VM.
Then it's up to the whims of the overcommit memory killer in Linux. I'm not sure if turning that off will cause fits in Android...
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Engineering's job is to make what marketing want work, not argue about whether the market wants the right thing.
Yeah; that's a common attitude. More often, the job is to take what management has ordered, because they think that's what the customers want, and find some way to implement it to meet the management requirements.
For example, years ago when MS-DOS was still widely used and MS-Windows was new, I was involved on an "embedded" project that was "required" to run on MS-DOS. I had a critical part of the task, making the startup code work (and also the shutdown that got a DOS prompt back on the screen). Wha
Re:Wrong conclusions from the data (Score:4, Interesting)
People are mixing up two different concepts: embedded != realtime.
Of course no one confronted with critical realtime requirements will choose Android java application as a solution.
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You would not use Android to directly control the hardware, that is handled by native code running on Linux. Android does make it possible to create good-looking user interfaces with minimum effort and - like you said - good portability. Since Android runs on top of Linux you can have both at the same time.
Re:Wrong conclusions from the data (Score:5, Interesting)
When they say "embedded" they probably don't mean headless boxes as you appear to be thinking of. At work we recently developed such a device, a tablet PC running Windows Embedded Compact 7 with one auto-starting app.
We looked at Android. You can either disable the home button in software or just omit it from the hardware so that your app is always in the foreground. Not that you would necessarily want to; eventually we would write a custom launcher that could start other apps we provided.
Windows Embedded Compact 7 is a turd. Parts of it just don't work. We raised a support ticket with Microsoft because Portuguese language settings didn't work and their response was "it's broken, we know about it and there is no business case to fix it, and BTW a bunch of other random languages don't work either". We were planning to use Silverlight to do our UI but performance was terrible, seemingly not using hardware acceleration at all (despite OpenGL ES working perfectly well). When you start playing stereo sound the left and right channels are sometimes randomly swapped. The whole thing is a giant cluster-fuck.
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The company that provided the ARM CPU module recommended it and said it was "fully supported". They lied.
Additionally they were only offering Android 2.2 at the time, which lacked USB host support, but it would have been worth porting 4.0. As it is we had to write our own GUI framework anyway because Silverlight was fucked.
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No production JVM is real time.
I'd agree that the standard JVM / JDK is anything but realtime, but Sun (Oracle now of course) created a JSR specifically tackling the shortcomings w.r.t. real time:
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Re:Wrong conclusions from the data (Score:5, Informative)
Lets say that your valve is from a 1987 Ford and it is for idle speed control. those valves run at 10 Hz so your best case 1 Msec response time will give you 1% increments from 0% - 100%. If you had a requirement to have better than 1% resolution, you couldn't get it. If your response time varied by 1 Msec as well, you couldn't hold better than 3% on the valve position giving your engine a roughly + - 2% window on the the idle speed. This in itself would be an objectionable level of idle stability on the slowest valve ever used for idle speed control.
But you might have a hardware PWM to help you gain accurate control of the valve by just loading a value to a register and calling it a day because the hardware timer will take care of giving you an accurate frequency and duty cycle, what could go wrong then?
The same issue would still manifest itself perhaps even to a greater extent because the PID calculations that you would be using for the speed control loop on your idle speed need to be taken at very exact intervals to get a good cause and effect relationship out of those calculations. At a 600 RPM idle on your 5.0L V-8 you will have 40 combustion events per second, and the PID would likely be calculated at the most every 50 mSec to get any kind of stability out of it. If your scheduling and task swapping caused that calculation time to vary + - 1 mSec that would also create a ~4% error in the PID output because it might have really measured the change over 49 - 51 mSec and now you not only have an invisible (to the software) amount of jitter to deal with you run the real risk of having 1 or 2 or 3 of the 25 mSec combustion events being used in your current idle speed calculation. If you got unlucky and just missed the 2nd combustion event in your calculation, you only have half of the "power in" you expected when you calculate what effect your valve position is having on your engine speed, your PID may say "hey, we need the valve open more!" so that calculation will drive the valve too far open. The next time the PID calculates it is likely to see the effects of 3 combustion events which will be driven by a valve that is now too far open and overcompensate again by closing the valve too much. The resulting engine speed will become very unstable.
You can see where you might want to be able to run that calculation faster say on a 10 mSec schedule. Now your 1 mSec jitter will result in a 20% variability in the time used in the PID calculation sometimes, so while you can run the calculation more often, and filter the output to the valve to keep your PID loop from essentially aliasing your combustion events, your increased time variance will somewhat negate any gains you had from running the calculation 5X faster increasing your CPU load (which will increase your 1 mSec response time jitter) and might make your system even harder to tune for a smooth idle.
Another Example:
If you were trying to monitor a 1 khz frequency by accumulating the pulses in a hardware counter and and were reading the result every 100 mSec, and you had 1 mSec jitter on the time you read your 1 mSec pulses. You would have a sample period of 99 - 101 mSec, this would automatically limit you to 10 hz resolution on your pulses (99 to 101 of them * 10) so your measured speed would best case read out 990 - 1010 hz and your control system would have to live with never knowing if it was really at 990 hz and read the frequency too soon, or it was at 1010 hz and read it a little too late. It would severely limit the control you would have on the process that was generating the pulses.
Hope this helps!
Cheers
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Of course, you can use a 1HZ signal to latch your frequency counter into a register for the software to read if you can't get the scheduling jitter down.
It's all a trade-off. If you can get the software's jitter small enough, you save on hardware.
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That is one of the nice features of the Atmel XMega parts as well as FPGA, IE being able to have a value automagically transferred from one piece of hardware to RAM based on a hardware trigger from another interrupt source without having to service the interrupt generated from your hardware as soon as possible to move the value yourself.
For lots of other parts you have to rely on a fast context switch to your ISR and at least put that value somewhere where it won't get changed by the continuous stream of pu
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Android is too much embedded linux for anything headless.
For anything with a display, however, it's just fine. And you can control a lesser microcontroller with it to get your realtime hardware interface. There's tons of things many don't think of as embedded OS which aren't even realtime, like automotive interfaces as the sibling comment says, or slot machines, or in-store coupon dispensers with attract displays. A lot of these sorts of things have traditionally run wince because it was pretty much the onl
Dalvik and processes (Score:2)
"But given how eagerly Dalvik disposes of anything connected to a process that'S not in the foreground I wouldn't consider using it to do anything important."
Dalvik has specifications and documented behavior and Dalvik follows that behavior pretty well. You do not see Dalvik disposing of anything connected with a process that is state that it supposed to save. Some state is ephemeral and documentation states it is ephemeral. I have yet to see an object held by a running Service to be arbitrarily destroye
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But for a(most likely) headless embedded system with a very specific task this is something I would not want. OTOH if you only use it for non-essential UI stuff like the display of a washing machine
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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100% correct what you say. Nevertheless, masturbating is necessary from time to time. Far too often important technical decisions are made by business people without a clue. Presenting them with some nice power point presentations and impressing numbers might help. Linux on top? Then it must be good. One million flies cannot err. So we might get directly or indirectly another supporter of Linux.
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Given that Linux got already 50% this way, even if all others, including the homegrown, would use the same non-Linux kernel
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As long as there is significant demand for small devices that run a Linux kernel, MS can't get the HW vendors to totally lock things down. It also makes a good argument for Free Software as Linux drives proprietary out of yet another market.
On the creative hacking side, it presents a possibility to drop uClibc and busybox on your device and have fun.
News at eleven (Score:4, Informative)
News at eleven...
Linux has been dominating the embedded market device for at least 10 years.
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That's not strictly true. Although my speciality isn't embedded systems, I went to an embedded systems conference back in 2000 and Linux very definitely was not dominating the market. Fears over the GPL were holding a lot of people back, especially those with custom hardware. VxWorks, LynxOS and QNX seemed to be the big boys, Linux was an interesting novelty, Windows was something to laugh and point at. How times have changed.
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In 2000, F5 networks and vmware were already running linux as many others were.
It is just not that well known, they kind of not advertise it that much...
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Windows was something to laugh and point at. How times have changed.
Admittedly taking these two sentences out of context, this might show how some things just haven't changed. ;-)
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Note that in the last ten years, there was no year 2000.
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If it was THE embedded systems conference (ESC), in the early 00's it was sponsored largely by QNX, VxWorks and Mentor Graphics (Nucleus RTOS) they even provided your folders for the event at that time, and sponsored many of the classes they had. I remember attending (still have the handouts in the binders) many talks that mentioned Linux, used it for part of the demos, and either made note of it's increasing functionality and popularity, or gave hints that Linux based products were being developed by near
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My speciality is embedded systems and I can attest to Linux being a dominate force for the past decade. Mainly due to a lot of work requirements being downgraded to soft real-time instead of the default hard real-time. QNX, VxWorks, and Phar Lap ETS still are preferred for projects with hard real-time requirements (Phar Lap ETS has fallen out of favor in our shop).
While Linux is growing in dominance it is not the only rising star. Projects like L4/fiasco looks promising and being deployed in projects (thou
Syntax Error (Score:2)
...it's dominANT, like "is dominant in BDSM scenes" rather than "will dominate the penis-length competition" or "that bitch is totally dominating his ass."
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Dominating? No. It wasn't until 2.5/6 that Linux got to be embedded friendly. 2.4 was starting to make inroads but you needed the MontaVista kernel with the SMP spinlock pre-emption points to get good regular behavior (2001). Before that it was way too unpredictable to ever be used in any "embedded" device. Since 2.6 things have gotten a lot better and the interests of the embedded market have always been taken into account.
But not dominating. VXWorks was and still is dominant. Around 2.6 era (2005), you co
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Linux is maybe bigger on the high end, but it's not big overall if you count embedded devices that range from using 64-bit power hungry chips all the way down to 8-bit micros. Linux essentially is big and bulky, relatively speaking. It's nice when you can afford the extra memory or CPU cycles as you get a lot of flexibility and free pre-built components, and Linux&BSD have far better network stacks than any commercial RTOS offerings I've seen. But a full Unix kernel is a drawback if you're on a slow
options? (Score:1)
unless you are into projects that don't require much of an operating system (such as assembly on AVR etc, probably the 28% custom/in-house figure), how many options are there apart from linux?
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TFA has a list of commonly used ones besides from Linux.
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reading tfa? next you'll expect me to rtfm /. become
omg what has
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NetBSD, FreeBSD...
Minix on embedded? (Score:2)
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Off the top of my head there's qnx and vxworks, but there are scads of small embedded operating systems, realtime and not, some of which are basically paired with a specific architecture and some which aren't, etc. There's no shortage of options.
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(substitute the greek letter for the word micro)
You may want to google "microC/OS". It is a simple library that you can add to your program. MicroC/OS-II was free for use if you purchase the book "microC/OS The Real-Time Kernel". I think it has since gone commercial at Micrium [micrium.com].
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wow there are quite a few options... thanks guys
Wrong angle (Score:1)
Especially since only Linux offers a proper setup for Android development. It's like saying "iOS developers love OS X" just because 100% of them do their iOS development on OS X - as the tools are only available for OS X. They may very well love OS X (really, who doesn't?), but that's not the sole reason behind the number.
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I don't understand your point. Android runs on top of the Linux kernel and if you go the native app route then you will be making Linux system calls. Unlike iOS, you can develop for Android using Windows and OS X too.
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But since this story is about embedded uses, users don't buy operating systems either, they buy the entire device.
Embedded devs on the other hand do select a kernel, and will often build their own userland to go on top of it.
Who's gaining? (Score:2)
The takehome from TFA for me was that Inhouse/Custom, Android, Ubuntu, FreeRTOS and Windows Embedded 7 are all gaining marketshare year over year with everyone else either holding steady or losing ground. They also happen to be the top 5 OS in the survey. The biggest gainer in what appears to be a consolidating market was Android.
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Circuitry and logic are supposed to be half an embedded system, not one percent.
I didn't know that there was an official exchange rates between gates and bytes so that one could numerically compare.
High level embedded systems (Score:3, Interesting)
So many misconceptions here.
1st we can assume Android uses the kernel Linux, so android "includes" Linux.
2nd, there are many types (levels) of embedded systems. Some don't need CPU (nor software). Some require a simple microcontroller, and some require true connectivity, true multitasking, lots of RAM, and maybe an MMU. Some of these systems run OS, and some of there are Linux. Lets call those "high level" -- happen to be the ones we interact on a daily basis (like a Smartphone for example).
Said that, the great vast majority of embedded systems are not "high level", and we normally don't even "use" them directly, so they don't run Linux (nor Android).
What is true is that in general, people that need to program in high level, prefer to code in Linux (or even Android) than to code in Windows CE, bare metal, or any other Embedded OS (or RTOS out there).
But still, it will take "long time" to Linux really dominate the embedded market.
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You've confused me with the following (not disputing just need clarification):
A CPU can be a traditional ASIC, RISC, microcontroller, or FPGA based. An majority of embedded applications can not take advantage of lots of RAM or have a MMU.
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Often you're stuck with a CPU that you don't want either, due to cost-per-unit pressures. So you can't run Linux even if you wanted to. Ie, ARM7TDMI is very popular since it's very simple but has no MMU.
50% is domination? (Score:5, Informative)
Now this [top500.org] is domination. And this [businessinsider.com] is starting to look like domination. Looks like embedded still has a way to go, though Linux overall looks healthier than ever.
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Resume' (Score:1)
I'm an embedded developer, professionally with experience down at bare metal (with my own scheduler), VXWorks, QNX, Linux and NetBSD. In my opinion, NetBSD was by far the best embedded OS to work with. In places I've worked, the main reason for choosing Linux over NetBSD is "Linux will look good on my Resume... No one knows what NetBSD is." ... I counter that they already have Linux experience, so having more keywords on their resume is better than appearing to only have experience with one OS.
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Would you say that you would cost more or less to hire than an equally knowledgeable Linux developer for consulting services?
Embedded Projects (Score:2)
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>> handle the overhead of writing a custom RTOS from scratch.
Surely you are not referring to Linux. RTAI, Xenomai, RT_PREEMPT. Not to mention the nonfree offerings.
No OS dominates the embedded market (Score:2)
Android maybe if all you look at is consumer do-hickies, but in reality there are billions of embedded systems you never see that perform flawlessly 24/7 for decades which use no OS at all
Forth! (Score:2)
OS? I don't need no stinking OS.
Google "Forth"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_(programming_language) [wikipedia.org]
Horses for Courses (Score:1)
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Old man noises
*imagines it* *shudders* Can I have a side of brain bleach with that?
I dont always use an OS in embedded projects (Score:2)
But when I do, I prefer to use Linux.
I did not mean to quote the most interesting man in the world, but it I like the way that reads.
NetBSD (Score:2)
NetBSD is not famous, but it definitively deserves a look for an embedded OS.
First, it supports major CPU used in the embedded field: ARM, SH3, SH5, PowerPC. So does Linux, but NetBSD has the nice ability to be cross-buildable from any POSIX/ANSI C platform. You can build your NetBSD embedded system from Linux, MacOS X, and even Windows + cygwin
Then there are the architecture and bus independant drivers. NetBSD uses the same driver for a given chip, whatever the CPU is, or whatever the bus the chip is hooke
Oblig. quotes (Score:3)
'Statistics are like a drunk with a lamppost, used more for support than illumination.'
-- Sir Winston Churchil
"There's Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics."
If you tweak statistics enough, you will always find what you are looking for. Especially if your sought answer has nothing to do with the questions that were asked. Or would you really ban sober driving if 25% of the traffic accidents are due to alcohol use?
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Oh come on, that AC deserves +5 for funny for his topic, leaving aside the dorky "first!". I was on the board of a company that was competing in that space (licensing embedded OS's) back in the 90's. We concluded we weren't viable because we were in the ~$7-10m a year range of licensing fees. We found out Windows CE, globally, was in the neighbourhood of $3.5m/y. Boggle.
We still concluded we weren't viable, and transitioned to a POSIX-compliant variant of Linux and other activities. Given this survey, I don