Embedded Linux Resource Design Issues



Nicholas Mc Guire
Thinkingnerds
Aignergasse 10, A-2020, Hollabrunn
der.herr$@$hofr.at

Abstract:

What is an embedded device ? Is it simply a low resources "PC", so all you need is a scale down Linux and off you go ? Not really. In this article a few thoughts on principal differences should be brought up that may need direct addressing by the embedded Linux community to push on Linux in the embedded market.
The starting point of these thoughts:

• Trusted kernel vs. untrusted user-space
• life time configurable vs. closed can-systems
• dedicated resources vs. dynamic user-demands
• User-space applications vs. kernel-space applications
• Realtime demands in embedded devices

Looking at these issues and considering possibilities to improve how Linux could satisfy the demands of embedded systems in a better way is the objective of this article, the possible solutions are based on RTLinux systems as realtime demands are fairly common in embedded devices, but the mechanisms presented applied to any RT or non-RT embedded Linux - comments/suggestions/flames would be appreciated as I belive a discussion on facilities specific to embedded systems in the Linux kernel needs to take place.

This paper and included code is under FDL [1] Version 1.2 and GPL [2] Version 2.0 respectively. The full sources with the appropriate build environment can be found in the current RTLinux/GPL rtlinux-3.2-pre1 [10] release.