Re: Reason not to use Linux?
- From: "Sonic" <spam@xxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 27 Oct 2005 13:50:23 GMT
Hi Andrew,
there are many aspects of a system that would dictate which OS may or may
not be suitable for your project. Before making an OS decision, it is
generally a good idea to have a shortlist of processors that would be
suitable for the job. The choice of processor might be for many reasons...
Cost of the processor
Heat dissipation
Power Consumption
Processing power
On-Chip Devices
On-Chip Ram
and many more
Once the processor has been chosen for specific reasons that are related to
your product, then you would tend to select an OS that exploited the
features of that processor.
For example, if your product was battery powered then you would want to make
sure that you had a 'fast' operating system that was able to control power
management features of the processor.
If the product is going to remain powered up and operation for extended
periods of time, then you may not care how long the OS takes to boot, but
you may care how fragmented the memory becomes. If the product is power
cycled on a regular basis, then you would want an OS that booted very
quickly, but would not necessarily care whether the memory became fragmented
or not.
Linux as a candidate, is slow, large, disk based (even if the disk is in
RAM) and very complicated to configure for bespoke hardware. If you need to
write your own device drivers then you are buying yourself a large chunk of
engineering hours just to get that part working.
On the plus side, Linux is free and lots of programmers know how to write
applications for it.
I would ask myself... If this system does not really have any real time
requirement, then why not just use a PC?
If there are specific reasons why a PC running Linux would not do the job,
then you need to ask yourself whether your needs will be met by embedding
Linux into some other hardware or whether you will only achieve your goal
with an RTOS.
Hope this helps.
K.
Is the product battery powered or is power easily available
"andrew queisser" <andrew.queisser at hp com> wrote in message
news:435fe3a6$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> I'm looking at OS choices for a 32bit embedded system with USB and
> BlueTooth. Right now our system has no OS at all but at some point we'll
> want one that makes it easy to extend with various peripherals (802.x,
> flash cards, IDE, etc.). The processor will be something like a low-end
> ARM, PPC, MIPS or similar (not chosen yet.) I'm looking at OS choices and
> Linux would fit the bill and I'm comfortable with it (no hard RT
> requirement we can't work around).
>
> What are real alternatives to Linux these days? I'm aware of ecos and
> FreeRTOS on the lower end and, of course, there's the commercial vendors
> like WindRiver, etc And then there's WinCE. What would be some reasons not
> to choose Linux? I'm trying to make sure I don't just pick Linux because
> it's been working ok for me.
>
> Thanks,
> Andrew
>
>
.
- References:
- Reason not to use Linux?
- From: andrew queisser
- Reason not to use Linux?
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