Real-Time Classics Prove They're Timeless

With Java, Linux and Windows pushing into embedded systems, the venerable RTOS vendors show they’ve still got what it takes

By Chris Lanfear

December 15, 2004 —

Going strictly by trade publications and press releases, one would think that the entire embedded systems market has been taken over by Linux, Windows, Java and other nontraditional embedded operating systems.

However, that is not the full picture of the industry. While Linux and Microsoft Corp. have certainly had success, much to each other’s dismay, there still remains a large community of real-time operating system suppliers targeting deeply embedded, safety-critical applications with severe power, processing and memory constraints.

While commercial real-time operating systems have been around since the early 1980s, real growth started as electronic content in a wide range of devices began to expand in the 1990s, when the industry flourished. But starting in 2000 and running through 2001 into 2002, the real-time operating system came under pressure as macroeconomic growth slowed and key industries (including telecommunications) crashed.

Coincidentally, this time period also saw the rise of Linux, Windows and Java in the embedded market. Their success and the overall poor performance of the traditional players combined to obscure what had been a clear definition of the real-time/embedded operating system market. So the question is: What ever happened to the classic real-time operating systems that have been somewhat overshadowed by the new market entrants? Some have been acquired, some have gone end-of-life, and some are thriving.

Neutrino is perhaps the most recent example of an operating system in transition. In October, Neutrino’s maker, QNX Software Systems Ltd., was acquired by Harman International Industries Inc. for US$138 million. Harman, a supplier of home and car audio products, had been a QNX customer for several years. Why would a car audio company want an embedded operating system supplier as a wholly owned subsidiary? The answer is telematics.

QNX has established its Neutrino operating system as the de facto standard software platform for a number of top-tier automotive suppliers, including Harman. Apparently, the impetus for the acquisition was a lack of confidence in QNX’s longevity. Twenty-three years of growth and profitability were not enough for the automotive industry to alleviate fears about the company’s future direction. In the automotive industry, product development cycles are measured in years (not months), and committing to a software platform for telematics is a serious undertaking. Major automotive manufacturers demanded more certainty, and Harman obliged them by ensuring that the QNX platform would be around for the foreseeable future.

Of course, there is some concern on the part of Harman competitors with previous relationships with QNX. It remains to be seen how other customers will react. Will they stay with the Neutrino-based software platform controlled by a single customer, or will they explore the many other options in the marketplace?

Whither VRTX?
Electronic Design Automation giant Mentor Graphics Corp. turned a few heads over the years with its acquisition of embedded software companies, including its spring 2002 purchase of Mobile, Ala.-based Accelerated Technology (ATI). Mentor Graphics had previously purchased Microtec Research in 1996. Microtec was known primarily for its compilers, XRAY debugger and VRTX operating system (commonly pronounced “vertex”). VRTX was the commercial real-time operating system that started it all.

When Jim Ready introduced VRTX in the early 1980s, virtually all embedded operating systems were built in-house by developers. Now, hundreds of commercial and open-source operating systems and in-house or “roll your own” operating systems account for only about one-quarter of the market, with the rest using open-source or commercial operating systems.

So what happened to VRTX? Following the acquisition of ATI by Mentor, VRTX was expendable. ATI already had its royalty-free Nucleus operating system that had a wider appeal than VRTX, which was primarily used in telecommunications infrastructure apps. Shortly after the acquisition, VRTX disappeared from Mentor’s marketing materials and is no longer sold by the company.

Nucleus, on the other hand, has continued to thrive under the merged company. In fact, the operating system has such a strong following that Mentor Graphics is now emphasizing the Nucleus name and phasing out Accelerated Technology.

Nucleus has established itself as a leading operating system for consumer electronics, mobile phones and other high-volume applications where its royalty-free business model and small footprint make it a natural fit. However, Mentor Graphics also has pursued safety-critical applications, including automotive and aerospace, by offering OSEK and DO-178B versions. OSEK is a trademark of Siemens AG and is meant to be an automotive industry standard for an open-ended architecture for distributed control units in motor vehicles, while DO-178B defines guidelines for the development of aviation software in the United States.

Mentor Graphics’ recent activity has centered on building out the tools and additional components required for Nucleus to compete in these markets. In 2004, the company announced that it would offer its tools on the Eclipse open-source integrated development platform rather than on the Visual Studio platform that it had used in the past. Other offerings include a wide variety of middleware and communications stacks.

When Red Hat Inc. acquired Cygnus Solutions, one of the pieces that came along in the deal was the eCos operating system. The design of eCos started in 1997 with the aim to build operating systems that would complement the GNUPro tools that Cygnus marketed. eCos was designed to be small, configurable and flexible. The business model was based on an open-source license with support provided by Cygnus. Its modular architecture and inexpensive licensing helped eCos build a loyal customer base.

Following the acquisition in 1999, Red Hat continued to market eCos, but clearly it was not going to work out in the long term. Red Hat is synonymous with Linux, and explaining why eCos was in the product portfolio was complicated as well as a drain on resources. Red Hat was under pressure to deliver on its business model, and supporting eCos was not part of its core strategy.

Red Hat support began to decline and eventually, in January 2004, the company announced that eCos would become an external open-source project governed by the Free Software Foundation. eCos continues to be used in embedded apps under its new licensing arrangement. Companies such as eCosCentric Ltd. provide support and service around the operating system.

Wind River Running Again
Recognized as the real-time operating system industry leader, Wind River Systems Inc. has been revitalized with new leadership and a more flexible product strategy. Co-founded in 1983 by Jerry Fiddler and David Wilner, Wind River has evolved from the consulting organization to a full-line supplier of embedded operating systems, development tools and services. Its flagship operating system, VxWorks, was originally a C runtime library for VRTX, but conflicts between Wind River and Microtec forced Fiddler to write a complete operating system from scratch. The name VxWorks was kept for the new full operating-system implementation.

VxWorks continues to be a market leader, though its packaging has evolved over time. While VxWorks still can be purchased as a stand-alone operating system, Wind River was one of the first of the traditional operating-system vendors to see the value in bundling the operating system together with tools and additional components into vertical market or application-specific platforms.

There are currently five vertical platforms for VxWorks: networking, consumer electronics, industrial automation, safety critical and car infotainment. As an example, the network equipment platform includes VxWorks, a number of commonly used network protocol stacks, development tools and services.

Although Wind River is growing again, it was the company most hurt by the downturn in the embedded market. A combination of factors contributed to the decline in revenue, including the decline in the network infrastructure space, competition from aggressive industry peers like Green Hills Software Inc., an increase in the use of embedded Linux, and the loss of pSOS customers from its ill-fated acquisition of Integrated Systems Inc. (ISI) in 1999.

At the time of the acquisition, ISI and Wind River were roughly the same size, around US$130 million dollars. Soon after the acquisition, Wind River announced that it would transition pSOS customers to VxWorks. An obvious problem arose: If you selected pSOS, likely you evaluated VxWorks and decided against it. Seizing the opportunity, competitors began offering pSOS evacuation packages. Venture Development Corp. (VDC) research has shown that while Wind River retained some customers, most moved to other real-time operating systems or Linux. Current developer research shows that pSOS is still used in some legacy applications, but the operating system, originally developed by Al Chau at Software Components Group, itself an ISI acquisition, will be an industry footnote in the near future.

Current Wind River management embraced a dual operating system strategy, pairing VxWorks and Linux particularly in network infrastructure applications. How this change in strategy plays out remains to be seen, but Wind River is working to be more responsive to customers and this is what they are requesting. They also are looking for simpler licensing agreements. Understanding this, Wind River has developed subscription pricing as well as a royalty buyout option. These changes plus continued improvements for VxWorks should position the operating system to effectively compete in the marketplace.

Not all embedded operating systems companies have been involved in mergers and acquisitions; some, like San Diego-based Express Logic Inc., continue to be independent. ThreadX, the operating system built by Express Logic was often thought to be a Green Hills product. In reality, Green Hills was a major distributor and a key tools supplier.

Although Green Hills still supports ThreadX, both companies now pay more attention to marketing their own products than relying on each other. Green Hills is pushing its VelOSity Microkernel that competes directly with ThreadX, and Express Logic is putting more effort into establishing its own brand and direct customer relations. Companies use ThreadX extensively in high-volume applications, where memory is highly constrained, due to its royalty-free pricing and tiny footprint (2.5KB at its smallest). Hewlett-Packard Co. has adopted ThreadX for all of its inkjet printers and many of its digital cameras. By Express Logic’s count, there are more than 100 million devices running ThreadX in the field.

Green Hills also has avoided acquisitions and instead has focused on developing its products. It introduced Integrity in 1996 after establishing itself as a leading supplier of compilers and debuggers for embedded applications.

Recognizing that the most successful companies in the market offered both high-quality tools and operating systems, Green Hills set out to build an operating system from the ground up with a focus on performance, reliability and footprint. The result was Integrity, which requires only 5,000 lines of code in its smallest configuration. At the core of Integrity is the VelOSity Microkernel, which Green Hills recently started marketing for applications requiring small and fast operating systems but not requiring the memory protection and partitioning of Integrity.

Integrity has become perhaps the leading operating system for military and aerospace projects with more than 50 major design wins. Some of the more high-profile projects that selected Integrity include the next-generation Joint Strike Fighter, F-22, and a number of military unmanned aerial vehicles. Green Hills has not stopped its product development efforts. The Santa Barbara, Calif., company has continued to develop Integrity by adding POSIX conformance to the latest 1003.1-2001 standard, the only operating system to achieve this level to date.

Another innovation is the capability to run other operating systems in partitioned “padded cells” controlled by Integrity. Integrity PC, a new product from Green Hills, controls access to the “guest” operating systems, providing increased security as well as handling real-time processing for specific tasks. The guest operating systems, which might be Linux, Windows or virtually any RTOS, will handle non-real-time tasks (e-mail, multimedia) and run legacy applications that would be difficult to port over. This approach is designed for applications that specify a particular nonsecure operating system, such as the military’s software-defined radio initiative.

Other potential uses include application areas, which have an installed base of non-real-time operating systems with large investments in application software but now require greater security, such as industrial automation and process control. The net result is that the investments made in the past can now be made secure to address threats in the present and future.

Dual RTOSes
The dual RTOS/Linux operating system strategy employed by Wind River, Enea and others was pioneered by LynuxWorks Inc. LynuxWorks offers LynxOS, a Unix-based RTOS that has binary compatibility with Linux, as well as Blue Cat Linux. The theory is that often a developer may think that Linux is the answer to his problem, but he then might need a full RTOS, or that developer may start with Linux and move to an RTOS as his project evolves.

Nevertheless, LynuxWorks has them covered. LynxOS has proven to be a reliable operating system in such diverse applications as those used in office machines and fighter planes. LynxOS conforms to the older 1996 POSIX standard and has been certified to the highest DO-178B level. Recent efforts have centered on improving LynxOS for military and aerospace apps where it has a substantial following due to its reliability.

Other classic real-time operating systems of interest include OSE (from Enea Embedded Technology) and ?C (from Micrium Inc.). OSE is popular in telecommunications, both infrastructure and edge devices, and remains a leading real-time operating system.

Recent changes at Enea, designed to make OSE a stronger competitor, include the reorganization of the company combining OSE Systems and its consulting divisions Teksci and Enea Realtime AB. The new combination allows Enea to market a combination of software and services, with the first major offering a platform for medical devices. The platform is based on the OSE operating system with Food and Drug Administration certification and is supported by consulting services provided by the former Teksci division. Other changes include a dual operating system offering with OSE and a Linux distribution from Metrowerks, a division of Freescale Semiconductor, for telecommunications infrastructure.

?C is a royalty-free operating system available through download or the book “?C/OS-II, The Real-Time Kernel” written by Jean J. Labrosse. Commercial shipments of devices incorporating ?C/OS-II require a commercial project license. ?C/OS-II has a very small footprint requiring just 2.5KB in its smallest configuration. In addition, it is supported by networking stacks, a graphical user interface and a file system. In a 2003 VDC survey, ?C was reported to be the third-most-used operating system by developers, behind Linux and VxWorks.

Contrary to reports, the real-time operating systems market is alive and thriving. Some consolidation has occurred and weak offerings have been dropped, but overall the players in the market today are smarter, quicker and better positioned for the future. That is important, because Java, Linux and Windows, previously confined to niches or applications that lie in the seam between enterprise and embedded, are being pushed into the real-time side of the industry by technology improvements, enhanced features and more commercialization. In some cases, the real-time players are pushing into the enterprise themselves.

The future remains interesting because the two camps will be forced to learn from each other. The real-time operating systems companies will learn about commercial issues, such as marketing, promotions and packaging, and the enterprise companies will learn about technical issues, such as reliability and performance. The result will be better products that are more easily comprehended by developers who will be the real winners.

Bill Lamie of Express Logic Inc. assisted with this article.

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