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And Another Thing...: Embedded Linux or Linux Embedded?
by Ted Bahr
 One of the new hot buzzwords you are hearing about is “embedded,” frequently coupled with the word Linux. Many of the Linux vendors have realized that embedding their software in millions of VCRs, even at a tiny run-time royalty, can add up fast. The idea with embedded Linux is that the main operating-system kernel is free, it’s supported by The Movement, and you can just pay for your tools and/or services. Of course, you pay for those $50,000 to $100,000 worth of services upfront, before you ship your VCRs, not after you’ve sold them.
Linux vendors have flocked to the embedded market as if it were made up of thousands of engineers foolishly overpaying for stuff that should be free. I have news for the Linux embedded vendors: It’s not that easy. We can break the contenders into two groups, with the first name representing the vendor’s background: embedded Linux vendors who have battled in the embedded market for years, and Linux embedded vendors who are trying to migrate their successes in the desktop/server world to embedded systems.
The embedded market is a strange, well-entrenched market that flies below radar and doesn’t take well to strangers. Over the years, I have watched a steady succession of companies, software and hardware, try to stake a claim in the embedded world. More often than not, they get chased out by the unique requirements of an embedded system: the need to be debugged to perfection; frequent marriage of hosts to different target chips; minimizing the functionality of the operating system (and often writing one); a kind of real-time not defined as simply really, really fast; and bare-metal coding to try to squeeze the application down onto a smaller, cheaper chip. This is not recommended for small children.
Companies like Borland, Microsoft and Novell have tried to get into the embedded market on and off for years. The conservative nature of embedded developers, who are as likely to be engineers as programmers, has created a market that evolves very slowly and eyes newcomers with great suspicion.
For example, Microsoft has spent upward of $100 million developing and promoting Windows CE, yet the platform has achieved a disappointing 1 percent market share. While CE is its strongest offering, Microsoft has been showing up at the Embedded Systems Conference since 1989, with lonely booths, barely manned and universally shunned. There’s no strong anti-Microsoft sentiment; there’s simply no sentiment at all. Embedded systems designers didn’t need 95 percent of Windows’ functionality in their products, and so Microsoft just wasn’t a factor.
So perhaps it’s not so strange, this embedded Linux fever. Maybe it’s another reflection of the open-source movement’s “Anyone but Microsoft” chant. The Penguinistas see the embedded systems market as another vendor-neutral country ripe for their evangelism, and maybe even some commercial sales.
Embedded devices, such as Internet appliances and handheld devices, are increasingly included in systems that integrate into native enterprise systems. As companies build these enterprise-to-embedded systems, there is a growing legion of IT software development managers learning the players and idiosyncrasies of the embedded market. If you’re one of them, be careful not to leap into the arms of Linux companies with little experience in the embedded world because they, too, are learning the idiosyncrasies—many times the hard way.
My advice? Don’t reject proprietary solutions out of hand. And if you choose to go with embedded Linux, look for the vendors that bear the lumps and scars from helping companies like yours build embedded systems for many years.
Look under the hood of companies like MontaVista or LynuxWorks, and you’ll find embedded industry veterans who will help you avoid the mistakes too easily made when building embedded systems. Meanwhile, the embedded Linux movement has encouraged longtime experienced embedded suppliers like Wind River and QNX to adopt more aggressive front-end pricing models. There have been many hot buzzwords over the years in the embedded systems market, but none are as valuable as this one: experience.
Ted Bahr is the publisher of SD Times, and president of BZ Media LLC, and he can be reached at ted@sdtimes.com
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