Reasons to Change or Upgrade your Embedded OS
There are numerous reasons to port your embedded software application to a new operating system. Some products have been in existence for more than a decade running on the same outdated operating system, other products are much newer but there is a serious question whether the OS manufacturer will maintain the operating system because they have other priorities. There are a host of reasons to consider changing your embedded operating system. Here are a few to think about: * In 1999, WindRiver Inc. acquired Integrated Systems Inc. After the acquisition was complete, ISI’s pSOS operating system was discontinued. It’s probably safe to say that any manufacturer with a product still running on the pSOS operating system should consider updating their operating system. * In 2002, Mentor Graphics acquired Accelerated Technology. Accelerated Technology’s Nucleus operating system is still sold by Mentor Graphics but Mentor has moved toward Android and Embedded Linux solutions with Mentor’s purchase of Embedded Alley in 2009. * In 2010, Research in Motion (RIM) acquired QNX. Since RIM’s primary focus is cell-phones, one might question the level of resources that RIM will dedicate to maintaining and upgrading the QNX operating system. * Cost – If your product is produced in high volume, moving the application to a royalty free operating system makes a lot of sense. Notice that Android (which is a Linux variation released by Google) has captured over 70% of the smartphone market. Regardless of the reason, upgrading or changing operating systems is usually not easy. There are a lot of questions to be addressed and work to be done. However, today experienced OS service providers have come up with a porting kit that makes changing to a modern OS easy and quick. The porting kit is a C/C++ source-level virtualization technology that enables software developers to reuse their software developed for VxWorks, pSOS, Linux/POSIX, Windows, Nucleus and μITRON on another OS easily. This saves money, time, porting labor, and offers superior performance while lessening the time to market. For those who want to upgrade their existing OS without changing OS vendors, there is an OS Version kit that enables applications to easily upgrade to the new OS version, without manual porting. Available OS Version kits are for: * LynxOS, LynxOS-178 and LynxOS-SE * Linux and RT Linux * Unix and Solaris Making your present software program adapt to a new OS can be an error-prone and is a laborious process. However, with Porting and OS version kits that are available today, software developers have the choice to move to a new, modern operating system that can support their future needs. This way, they can leverage their present embedded software investment and avert expensive porting concerns in the future. Related Links: Cross-platform Development in C , ada to c