Posted on 02/19/2016 7:51:59 AM PST by ShadowAce
M4L Linux
Thanks Shadow. I have been doing a little dipping in the water with Arduino, which I see supported. I did some microcontroller programming 25 years ago, but have forgotten most of it. I will have to look into this further.
Still too large for microcontroller applications. Most microcontrollers don’t even need an operating system, due to the small amount of RAM and ROM available on the IC, like the Atmel AVR uC’s on Arduinos, the PIC uC’s from Microchip, down to all of the old 8031/8051 and 6805/6811 variants.
The compilers and IDE’s used native assembly for programs, and later C for PIC’s and Arduinos.
All true but they’re probably looking to change the paradigm. Maybe (just speculating) people will write simple python apps for IoT applications. I don’t think you could do this sans an OS. What you say is true historically but it doesn’t mean it has to be true in the future.
Are they trying to compete with Raspberry Pi?
The RPi is mainly hardware. It is capable of running complex OSes, but Zephyr is strictly an OS meant to run on multiple types of hardware.
QNX had a pretty nice embedded RTOS kernel called Neutrino, but I think they’ve been lost along the linux wayside.
Yeah. Embedded OSes are niche enough that companies have a hard time employing people just to write code that doesn't immediately meet a project need, and coders have a difficult time getting hired on just to experiment with code.
Open sourcing the OS--the bread and butter of proprietary embedded companies--solves both of these as people who just want to play around can write code to meet their curiosity, and companies can take advantage of a larger labor pool.
Models like that grow much faster than models like Neutrino where it is highly restricted.
Don’t get me wrong, I think that IofT is a cool concept. What I was driving at is that most of the uC’s in use today just don’t have the horsepower to handle a TCP/IP stack AND perform the low level functions that a uC are designed for, if you threw in a OS. Use a Atmel AVR as an example. Could you cram all of that into 32kb of memory? You could do it with serial on a commodore or apple IIe (that makes me feel old just typing that).
The Arduino “shield” approach would work best I think. A uC to handle comm protocols, a uC to handle machine function, and serial eeprom to hold the OS, distributed processing. A trip through the manufacturers catalogs should reveal some nice gems to exploit. I think that after years of “wintel” software bloat, the newest crop of programmers are rediscovering the concept of “code efficiency”.
Yep. Just to date myself, I supervised a group in the 90s that used iRMX on Intel boxes, and then were one of the first to migrate to what was then called iRMX for Windows, later named InTime which is still supported by tenAsys that bought it from the Intel OMO group. It was very cool to be running Windows as a task and doing machine control with the PC hardware, but the PLC companies saw the threat and effectively rolled it into their offerings. Now the line is so blurry you just pick hardware that fits your needs and don’t worry about what’s inside.
“Key features of the Zephyr Project’s RTOS are said to include:
CPU architecture independent”
Then it should run on my PC? Bull pucky.
I am of the opinion that Minux3 would have been a better starting point.
Points all taken. I just think that the industry moves in some very consistent directions
- Make platforms easy to develop for.
- Memory is getting cheaper - expect more and more of it.
- Stuff is getting smaller - expect smaller and smaller packages.
- The SOC paradigm is a powerful one - expect more of it as well.
- With the containers paradigm there is also the trend towards same platform/environment everywhere which feeds back to #1 above.
Put all these together and this seems quite believable to me. It’s not the past but it could well be the future.
Neutrino likely exists as it was part of a major product that a major company I worked for put out.
Rpi and beaglebone are nice examples of cheap SoC compact computers. They’re prime examples of cheap and powerful single board computers. What I was pointing out with the microcontrollers though is cheap and efficient processing power for embedded comsumer product applications. Those types of applications don’t require an OS to function, a compiled program in native code to the processor is plenty enough.
Sure I get it. A toaster or a thermostat doesn’t need an OS and typically haven’t had them. But does this mean that we won’t ever get to that state? I don’t know that it does.
In particular the IOT concept where the device is sending sending TCP/IP packets to report on it’s state - an OS would give you the capability to easily do this. A simple C program - not so much.
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