Monday, August 25, 2008
With potentially huge savings on operating software, development tools, recurring royalties, and schedules, designers and managers must at least consider open-source software on each new embedded-system project. A wide variety of open-source software has gained a foothold just as the embedded-system industry moves from limited-resource designs to high-performance systems with complex applications that may require new software functions, such as high-speed networking, wireless communications, interactive graphics, and data encryption. Developers can save thousands of man-hours of development costs by integrating freely downloadable operating systems, libraries, and components with their application-specific custom software.
Designers can choose from a variety of open-source-software components ranging from multiple variations of the wildly popular Linux operating system to sophisticated debugging tools. SourceForge.net, the largest open-source-software-development site, provides free hosting to more than 180,000 registered projects, including database, security, gaming, clustering, multimedia, and VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) offerings. Before you jump on the bandwagon and start downloading free code, however, take a close look at the open-source characteristics that make it popular and the problems that designers cite as reasons to stay away. Customization, support, licensing, fragmentation, hardware costs, development tools, and real-time performance are just a few of the issues that can influence your decision.
The initial task for embedded-open-source-software users is to adapt the code to work with a specific hardware configuration. By their nature, open-source products must fit the widest array of users, so they require generalization and do not target one application. This generalization can force designers to increase the memory system, and, unless the lack of royalties offsets it, this extra memory requirement translates into a higher recurring cost for the embedded device. Most commercial off-the-shelf board vendors now offer preconfigured open-source board-support packages for their products. For example, WinSystems provides a customized open-source-development kit with its off-the-shelf board-level products, which includes device-specific drivers, documentation, cables, and a quick-start guide. The kit also includes Blue Collar Linux, a basic embedded implementation of the Linux operating system that you can re-create from open-source files without special or proprietary development tools.
By: DocMemory
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