“What is an embedded device? Is it simply a low-resource ‘PC’, so all you need is a scaled down Linux and off you go? Not really. In this article, a few thoughts on principal differences will be brought up that may need direct addressing by the embedded Linux community to foster the use of Linux in the embedded market.” Read it at LinuxDevices.
Embedded Linux Design Issues
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I appreciate links to this sort of stuff. Being an electronic engineer The embedded world is so much more interesting to me – I know only too well the problems of restricted memory space and squeezing bang per interupt cycle out of things. But I’m not S/W, I’m H/W – so I only ever read what others do (and then complain about it
). So it is interesting to see how you shrink linux down to this sort of level.
How does the kernel licensing affect changes made that are needed to make the system work in the device? With the kernel being GPLd, do those changes need to be made public? Is the software (the kernel) distributed by being embedded in the device?
read IBM’s view on it.
>>>>Most recently we wanted to make good use of Linux, because we wanted to ship some hardware where we said we would put a little operating system kernel into the hardware. This should enable us to do the initial program load specifically of Linux on top it of the small kernel. Flexible from different targets – CD-ROM, network or whatever. The first idea to take Linux was abendend. We didn’t want to do a distribution, because we didn’t want a patent infringement being detected. If somebody would have taken us to court we might have had to stop shipping our product.
http://www.sslug.dk/patent/strassemeyer/transr-del.shtml