Linux appears to be approaching dominance in embedded systems a trend that might

make it easier for developers to choose a platform, speeding embedded systems' growth on

the whole.

As of last quarter, Linux owned the highest percentage of new embedded-development

projects of any operating system, according to a recent end-user survey by Venture

Development Corporation (www.vdc-corp.com), a technology market research and

consulting firm. VDC conducted the survey as part of its 2004 Embedded Software

Strategic Market Intelligence Program (www.vdc-corp.com/embedded/reports/04/br04-

21.html).

Driving this growth, at least in part, are developers who are migrating to Linux from

Windows and the previous leader, Wind River Systems' VxWorks, says VDC analyst

Stephen Balacco.

A dominant software platform such as Linux could boost embedded systems to rival PCs.

Evidence from the mobile phone market alone puts potential embedded devices for Linux

well above the number of PCs sold.

At 15.5 percent, commercial embedded Linux owns approximately 50 percent more of the

new project market than either Microsoft or Wind River Systems (www.windriver.com),

according to the survey. And, as telecom and consumer electronics each sell more units

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worldwide than the PC market, Linux's success in those areas points to continued growth.

VDC's Balacco cites telecommunication and data communication requirements, which are

consolidating around carrier-grade Linux, as a force driving Linux into the telecom space

(and driving VxWorks out). Furthermore, Balacco says, in-house developers writing

embedded systems for consumer electronics opt for Linux over Windows CE to blend "roll-

your-own" and shrink-wrapped solutions by exploiting open source code, project control,

and negligible licensing costs.

Linux is expected to make up an ever-larger percentage of the world's embedded systems

market, which grew to more than US$760 million in 2003, according to VDC.

VDC estimates that worldwide shipments of embedded Linux operating systems, add-on

components, and related services were at $65.2 million in 2003. The same research predicts

embedded Linux revenues will reach $118.5 million by 2006.

One contributing factor is the GNU General Public License

(www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html), which prevents the burgeoning aggregate of public

Linux code from stealing away inside small, commercial systems. The license mandates

that if you go commercial, you must go public with additions to the Linux code base.

Another driver is the plethora of new devices that developers can write to. Jim Ready, CEO

of MontaVista (www.mvista.com), which controls the largest market share of embedded

Linux, compares the situation to TV technology's expansion. When a TV was just a TV that

you plugged into the wall, hooked up to your antenna, and accessed with a remote control,

it was a metaphor for the whole universe of development, Ready says.

"Now you want to have a TiVo-like experience with a hard drive. The 4-Kbyte OS that was

good enough for a TV doesn't scale into an environment in which you can do the kinds of

things that you want to do with TVs today," he says. "Multiply that by virtually every kind

of interesting device cars, smart homes and appliances, instrumentation it's a wide

range, not to mention cell phones."

An additional hidden market boosts the Linux camp. "Our report measures the commercial

market for Linux," Balacco says. "[But] there is an extremely large developer market out

there that is not using commercial solutions. I would put it in the 40 to 50 percent range

those who are using noncommercial or public distributions of Linux."

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According to the VDC survey, embedded developers using Linux most frequently cited

Windows CE/.NET, VxWorks, and proprietary in-house-developed or no formal OS as the

systems they used in previous projects.

Linux's competitors hope to win back those customers. Some vendors are opening up their

source code, and previous market leaders Wind River and Microsoft are pricing their

offerings more competitively.

Wind River, the largest public company in the embedded software space, has a vested

interest in protecting market share for its proprietary VxWorks solution. In the past year,

the company has begun a transformation. "Through a partnership with Red Hat, Wind

River will provide a platform that will incorporate Linux, specifically directed at the

telecom space," Balacco says, referring to the new Red Hat Embedded Linux solution,

announced in February 2004.

Inder Singh, CEO and chairman of LynuxWorks (creators of the Lynx OS), says the move

confirms Linux's dominance. "I thought that was one of the strongest proofs when the

largest company that is fighting Linux decides it has to give in," he says. "That would be

like Microsoft saying Linux is the future of desktops."

Microsoft also seems to be making some concessions to better compete with Linux.

"Microsoft is releasing the majority of its CE source code," Balacco says. "They've reduced

their runtime royalties significantly on the CE core license. They've set up developer Web

meetings to talk with developers. They are creating a community of developers around the

Microsoft products, in particular CE. They have taken steps to try to meet the challenges

resulting from the perceived benefits of Linux."

If Linux's growth does skyrocket, as VDC predicts, it could spur a significant shift in the

global computer market, including both traditional computers and embedded systems.

"Embedded systems have always been the stepchild of computing," Ready says. Although

most microprocessors and microcontrollers go into embedded systems rather than servers,

desktops, and laptops, the embedded market has never come together as a single driving

force.

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Without Linux, myriad runtime systems would litter the development landscape,

fragmenting the embedded-software plane among multiple OSs and stunting the embedded-

systems market's growth. "Imagine what desktop computing would be if there were 40

different OSs, all of them incompatible with each other, and you were trying to find a word

processor. The economics get lousy for everybody," Ready says. "If you're an application

developer, which of the 40 do you target to develop to?"

With a single, dominant software platform such as Linux, the target would be clear. "As

Linux becomes pervasive in the nondesktop, nonserver space, embedded devices become

an enormously powerful and influential platform, rivaling that of the PC," Ready says.

Handset sales for 2004 are expected to be triple the number of PC sales. More than 309.4

million handsets were sold in the first half of 2004, according to the Gartner analyst group

(www.gartner.com). Total 2004 PC shipments aren't expected to be much over 175 million

units, according to the IDC analyst group (www.idc.com).

"Today's average cell phone has as much compute power as your desktop did five years

ago. There are those that argue that the next platform of significance in computing will be

the phone," Ready says. "That is not a Microsoft monopoly; in fact, it's just the opposite,

and it's a very attractive home for Linux."

And that's just phones. Consumer electronics and other embedded markets only enhance

the picture.

Linux is compatible and interoperable from distribution to distribution and with other

Linux- and Unix-based systems and software. MontaVista built its Linux distribution

without concern for compatibility with Oracle, and it runs fine as a platform under Oracle

9i.

Linux is also attractive for networked devices, which are becoming ubiquitous and a

broadening portion of the embedded market (smart homes, smart appliances, networked

consumer electronics, and so on). "Once you sit on the network, you are likely to want to

run multiple applications," Ready says. "For example, you are likely to want to have

remote management and security capabilities.

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"In the [real-time OS] world, most of that was either missing, done ad hoc, or ported over

from Unix." If you examine the kinds of environments you have on networks, you'll find

that Linux supplies the vast majority of applications for these off the shelf, Ready adds.

One of Linux's chief applications is security. Developers generously apply Linux to secure

systems, commercial and homespun firewalls, and other network devices such as smart

firewalls and routers. This is a natural progression from Linux's predominance as a network

development platform.

There is some question, however, as to whether Linux is secure enough, because so many

people develop for it. "One of the trends that we are seeing [to address that] is an

architecture called Mill's architecture, which creates multiple virtual environments on a

given processor," Singh says. "You can run Linux inside one of those secure partitions.

That is something we are actively working on with the [National Security Agency] for

some major customers."

Real-time requirements are still an issue with Linux. Some applications require response

times in microseconds and nanoseconds. "For example, antilock brakes. If you're moving in

a car at 70 mph on the freeway, when you step on that brake pedal, you want response time

in a modern car to be on the order of a few hundred nanoseconds," says Murry Shohat,

executive director of the Embedded Linux Consortium (www.embedded-linux.org).

Fortunately, most applications are comfortable running in the millisecond range.

Linux has the millisecond range covered. MontaVista and other developers helped close the

gap between Linux and the real-time operating systems by adding modifications, which

became part of the Linux 2.6 kernel (www.kernel.org) in December 2003.

According to Ready, one such modification, which MontaVista had in its Linux product,

decreased the real-time scheduling latency to about one millisecond in a computing

environment with a midrange, approximately 500-MHz Pentium processor. "There are

certain applications where that is still way too slow, where you need to get to process levels

at least a factor of 10 better than that," he says. "Achieving that is part of an effort that we

currently have under way."

Linux has been improving its real-time capabilities while also addressing internal design

issues for multiprocessor systems. "You have multiprocessors that are sharing common

data structures, and you have to avoid lockouts of any kind you have to make things very

preemptible," Singh says. "That's what you have to do to make things good for real-time,

too."

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As Linux addresses demands for a smaller footprint and more real-time capabilities, it will

continue to expand its presence within the embedded market. Some say the platform is the

best bet for success.

"The number of applications that cannot technically use Linux is shrinking to where those

won't necessarily be a very fast-growing business. They will be marginal applications,"

Ready says. "For the vast majority of interesting applications, where all the volume is,

Linux is technically capable today. And it's provable we're in phones."

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