[SqNOS] Operating Systems on the Rise; Embedded Systems Design (06/06) Vol. 19, No. 6, P. 53; Turley, Jim

[Klaus D. Witzel]

List,

this is perhaps interesting.

/Klaus

<quote>
Embedded Systems Design's annual survey of embedded systems developers  
finds that around 28 percent of all embedded systems currently under  
development will have no operating system (OS), and this absence is  
especially prominent among developers of consumer, automotive, and  
industrial electronics; conversely, computer peripherals are most likely  
to feature OSes. A lack of need was the top reason provided by respondents  
for not including an OS, followed by the pressure an OS would put on the  
system's processor and/or RAM, cost, and difficulty of use. According to  
the poll, OSes are more likely to appear in products at larger companies  
than at smaller companies, while more experienced developers tend to use  
an OS in the current project. Of the respondents who do use an OS, 51  
percent employ a commercial, off-the-shelf system; 21 percent use a  
proprietary, in-house, or internally developed OS; 16 percent use an  
open-source OS; and 11.8 percent use a commercial Linux distribution. From  
these findings, it can be surmised that the popularity of commercial OSes  
is growing dramatically, and that such OSes are taking the place of  
in-house OSes. Developers who opted for a commercially available OS said  
the choice of OS was most heavily influenced by the software staff,  
although the software manager also ranked highly as a decision maker.  
Top-ranking criteria for assessing OSes include real-time performance,  
processor support, software tool availability, a lack of royalties, cost,  
memory footprint, simplicity, and middleware availability. The survey  
indicates a precipitous drop in commercial and noncommercial distributions  
of open-source OS usage over the last year, with poor performance and/or  
real-time capability, support concerns, memory usage, legal ambiguousness,  
the state of development tools, and price cited as reasons for the  
decline. Over 36 percent of respondents said they would use a different OS  
in future projects than the one they currently use, while around 63  
percent said they would keep using the same OS.
</quote>

http://www.embedded.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=187203732