Sorry, if I'm breeching protocol with crossover, please flame me privately.
This article:
http://www.embedded.com/story/OEG20021202S0052
was causing a bit of anger and disgust on another list, and I could
pretty much see why. This guy has 15 years of working experience with
vxWorks, none with embedded Linux, or even with Linux in general as far
as I could tell.
His complaint was that embedded Linux is touted as being free, but it
wasn't. But generally he and his team made a bunch of bad choices in
terms of system design, and he was publicly penalizing embedded Linux
for these.
Example, he complained that while e-Linux is touted as being free, he
had to pay a consulting group a lot of bucks to port the kernel to the
uP that they'd selected. I think an obvious no-brainer would have been
to choose a uP that's already supported rather than taking the risk of
going off into the great unknown.
Other complaints that he made:
They had to re-write some Linux drivers because again, they weren't
supported for the uP they chose.
The consulting group ported the kernel for some reference design that
was available for the uP, and so they then had to spend time(=money)
cusomizing for their custom hardware design.
While I agree that in some ways Linux dev is a bit like trying to hit a
moving target, the problem was amplified because they kept recieving
kernel updates from their consultants, and they kept updating their
kernel rather than freezing it, resulting in having to rewrite some of
their driver code multiple times. Again, the no-brainer I think would
have been to focus on a snapshot of what they needed, and only fold in
kernel mods that would fix problems. Plus, in my mind I associated this
as a problem with the consultants, not e-Linux.
The author had to recompile gcc as a cross compiler for his uP, which he
thought was a pain.
The author had a harder time getting some things working using e-Linux
than he did with vxWorks. But they were things like applications to
convert the kernel + applications into a ROMable image, stuff that I've
seen available on the net before. My thinking was that if he had 15
years worth of experience with Linux these things would have been just
as easy.
Anyway, I generally like reading about peoples experiences with embedded
Linux and Linux as applied to science, so I apreciated the article, I
just wish it would have been more objective, and not so much playing the
blame game. One point he made was that they failed to make the date for
demoing the product to their customers, and he pretty much intimated
this was e-Linux's fault, which I thought was pretty bogus.
-Charles
