Many RTOS flavors serve embedded

By Lisa L. Morgan

January 1, 2009 —

Multicore, security, virtualization and more highly integrated software solutions have been driving changes to real-time operating systems, and developers expect those trends to accelerate this year.

Multicore and the need for integrated products are the biggest RTOS drivers; requirements for virtualization and security vary with the target application. “Multicore is gaining traction because speeds and feeds are always critical,” said Brian Gildon, wireless product marketing director at Enea.

But some RTOS vendors say embedded designs are about more than just speeds and feeds. A number of vendors discussed their products and market focus with SD Times.

Five-nines uptime
Enea has customers in the telecommunications, automotive and medical equipment sectors. But its main focus is telecoms, where Enea’s OSE RTOS can be found in everything from the core network infrastructure to network equipment to handsets. Some infrastructure and network equipment designs include two RTOSes: one for the control plane and Enea’s OSE for the data plane. OSE has also found design slots in 400 million handsets, according to the company.

Gildon said Enea’s message architecture is advantageous in the networking space, where, for example, media gateways can now provide better control of the environment. He also said Enea is one of the few vendors on the market that is delivering “fine nines” (99.999%) reliability, and that the company supports both symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP), in which multiple cores share processing tasks and memory, and asymmetrical multiprocessing (AMP), in which processors have dedicated functions and may not share all memory.

Enea is “focused on the transition from SMP to AMP. SMP is popular now, but AMP is where a lot of people will go in the future,” Gildon said. “We have a flexible architecture that provides backward compatibility and scalability.”

Enea also offers Optima, an Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE).

Systems approach
Kerry Johnson, director of product management at QNX Software Systems, said his company has been supporting SMP since 1996. However, at that time symmetrical multiprocessing was supported on single-core designs, such as Cisco’s networking products and high-end medical imaging applications built on Intel platforms.

“In the past, the move to multicore was limited to niche applications,” Johnson added. “Now people are generally more concerned about software migration, such as how to run multiple RTOSes on dual and quad cores.”

QNX’s approach purportedly anticipates a single core but also supports multiple cores to ease the transition for developers. The QNX Neutrino RTOS is based on Linux, but Johnson said the bulk of innovation lately has driven by middleware and application advances.

QNX considers itself the leader in automotive infotainment systems but also serves customers designing industrial automation systems, medical equipment, networking equipment and consumer electronics. The product features play out differently depending on the application. In telecom, the emphasis is on five-nines uptime; in wind power applications, blades need to decelerate in an orderly fashion; in turbine control systems, safety is critical; and in automotive infotainment systems, poor performance can result in a recall and compromise the brand.

Johnson said QNX’s middleware pieces are what separate QNX from the competition and that the company provides an RTOS, middleware and drivers to save developers the hassle of integrating different products from different vendors. “We’re putting together larger building blocks and systems to solve integration issues,” he said.

QNX offers a tool set called Momentics and plans to offer consulting services in the near future.

High reliability, security
Green Hills Software provides a number of operating systems, including a Linux-based RTOS called Integrity for high-reliability apps, Integrity 178-B for avionics and Velosity for fast, low-cost, high-volume and resource-constrained designs (it also serves as the Integrity kernel). The company also offers several industry-specific platforms, as well as middleware specific to networking, file systems, USB and graphics.

According to David Kleidermacher, chief technology officer of Green Hills, there is an increasing focus on open source and on standards such as Posix. Developers are also trying to get a better handle on multicore and on whether they should be using SMP or AMP.

Green Hills isn’t pushing its customers either way. “We’re agnostic,” said Kleidermacher. “Our focus is on security and reliability.”

Integrity was built into B-1 bombers as early as 1997. More recently, in November, the National Security Agency granted Integrity-178B an Evaluation Assurance Level 6+ rating after completing several years of testing. In addition to avionics and defense apps, Integrity has found use in infotainment systems, medical equipment, industrial control systems and consumer electronics.

“You need to be concerned about middleware, the maturity of the product, tools and third-party integration, because companies are consolidating and products come and go,” Kleidermacher said.

Virtualization
George Brooks, director of business development at LynuxWorks, said developers are considering virtualization as they ponder how to take advantage of multicore chips.

“Over the past three years, we’ve been focused on applying virtualization on everything from servers to embedded systems, based on feedback from our customers,” he said.

Virtualization is attractive to developers building safety-critical applications because failures can be isolated and applications can be kept separate. Like many of its competitors, LynuxWorks takes a systems approach to design. It offers three LynxOS RTOSes, the LynxSecure embedded system hypervisor and the BlueCat embedded Linux OS.

“Developers are really moving toward a systems mentality, which means the pieces that make up systems need to work closer together,” said Brooks. “That’s why you’re seeing more of a domain focus and a move toward standards.”

Another factor driving a more integrated, systems-oriented software approach is the free open-source software that chip companies are providing to help their customers hit the ground running for embedded systems development. The problem, said Brooks, is that developers have to cobble together bits and pieces of software, when a better long-term approach is to use a commercial product such as LynuxWorks’ Luminosity IDE. That way developers can focus on adding “value” in the form of domain-specific expertise, he said.

Most of LynuxWorks’ customers come from the military or aerospace sectors, although the company moved into the medical device space last year and plans to move into the automotive market in the future.

Broad interoperability
Multicore is changing the embedded landscape across all vertical markets, observed Mark Brown, vice president of VxWorks marketing for Wind River. His company is providing a multicore software solution across all four of its RTOSes, including VxWorks and Wind River Linux, as well as a multicore-aware tool set called Workbench. The company also offers middleware, a range of industry-specific platforms and a general-purpose platform.

One reason Wind River has four RTOSes is that one RTOS cannot support the requirements of all applications, Brown said.

“In 2009 we’re going to see a lot of investment in multicore, [and] there is a high demand for a safe and secure OS,” Brown said. “[At the same time,] customers aren’t confident they understand multicore design.”

Wind River’s customers design multiple independent levels of security (MILS), networking, industrial control, and medical and consumer electronics products. In the networking space, Wind River Linux is being used for the control plane and VxWorks on the data plane. Both operating systems support AMP, SMP and virtualization.

Fine-tuning
MontaVista offers two platforms: MontaVista Linux Professional Edition, a general-purpose platform for commercial-grade development, and MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition, which specifically targets telecom customers. The company also offers Mobilinux for mobile devices and an IDE called DevRocket 5.

MontaVista sells primarily to the telecommunications market, where its carrier-grade Linux is used in networking equipment. There are also about 40 million handsets powered by MontaVista.

“Historically, Linux was [unable to operate] in real time,” said Jim Ready, MontaVista's founder and chief technology officer. MontaVista has been adding real-time capabilities to Linux, to the tune of four major revisions in the past 18 months, he said.

Developers like Linux because it provides openness, a large base of knowledgeable developers and lots of applications. Conversely, traditional RTOSes are proprietary; the vendors define the interfaces and architecture, said Ready.

“Linux is not a fad," said Ready. “It’s here to stay.”

Linux is not ideal for all designs, however. If the design has a dedicated function and small format, such as in an antilock braking system, it probably doesn’t make sense to add memory to run Linux, Ready said.

High-volume production
Neil Henderson, general manager of Mentor Graphics’ Embedded System Division, isn’t so sure about the long-term prospects of Linux, at least from an RTOS vendor’s perspective.

“Linux is designed for the desktop [as demonstrated by its] latency and footprint,” he said. “People like Linux because of the number of applications that run on it. But most of those applications are not important to embedded devices, and commercial developers have no incentive to turn their code over to the community.”

Traditional RTOSes have a long history of evolution; indeed, the question at this point is, “What is an RTOS?” Henderson said today’s developers are looking for integrated products, so vendors are spending less time evolving their OSes and more time on the other pieces that let embedded developers bring products to market quickly and easily.

Mentor’s own Nucleus OS has evolved from a kernel to include kernel services, extensions and APIs. The company also offers the Edge Suite, which includes an IDE, compiler, debugger, simulation and testing.

Even as developers demand more-integrated tools, they’re asking the same old questions about speeds and feeds, Henderson said. Instead they should be asking about relevant domain expertise and the length of time the vendor has served that market, he believes.

“You have to ask yourself whether [a vendor’s] business model and product line will allow you to reach beyond the US$100 million revenue point,” said Henderson. “For that, you need an end-to-end solution that supports high-volume production and can be used affordably.”

Most of Mentor’s customers design consumer electronics devices; others design medical equipment and industrial control systems. Henderson sees a migration from AMP to SMP, though he said the performance degradation SMP causes doesn’t work well for embedded.

“We need the means to move to a level other than SMP,” he said.

RX for pain points
Stephen Martin, vice president of sales and marketing at Quadros Systems, also sees a shift away from RTOS products to integrated software solutions, saying his customers don’t want to have to put the pieces together.

The RTXC Quadros RTOS has five kernel configurations that provide traditional multitasking, a run-to-completion model or a combination of the two. The company also offers middleware in the form of communications stacks and file systems, as well as the VisualRTXC design tool. While some RTOS vendors offer compilers and debuggers, Quadros instead creates application design tools that are tightly coupled with the operating system and provide kernel awareness, Martin said.

“Developers are asking how they can lower risks and speed development when they’re faced with a growing complexity of applications, faster time-to-market, and smaller staffs,” he said.

Historically, Quadros has served the automotive market, but over time it has acquired customers building industrial control systems, telecom equipment and consumer electronics. Developers remain concerned about efficiency, footprint size and power consumption, but they are also concerned about scalability. Quadros allows developers to include or exclude features, so they can optimize power and performance for the target device.

Like MontaVista’s Ready, Martin thinks free software from hardware vendors is problematic. “Four or five years ago [the chip manufacturers] decided they could sell more hardware if they gave away software,” he said. “Good software isn’t free.”

Smartphone focus
Most vendors interviewed for this article started in one vertical industry and then moved to others. The exception is Symbian, which is completely focused on mobile phones. Nokia is acquiring Symbian, but the cell phone vendor is turning over all of the intellectual property to the Symbian Foundation, a nonprofit organization whose members include major cell phone manufacturers.

“It won’t be just the kernel,” said Jonathan Webb, principal product manager at Symbian. “It will include an OS, middleware, tools and applications.”

To encourage broad adoption, other operating systems will be supported via ports. Symbian has been focused on ARM processors, but others will be supported in the future, Webb said.

Symbian claims to hold 60% to 65% of the smartphone market, with slots in 226 million phones as of the beginning of 2008. All of those phones have a consistent API and compatibility, so there are no binary systems breaks; applications simply run, Webb said.

Symbian uses the Freeway Communications Architecture, which is optimized for network throughput performance. The company has had a multithreaded OS for some time that purportedly eases the transition to multicore.

Unlike the other vendors, which are helping customers move from single-core designs to multicore designs, Symbian got its initial experience with multicore designs a few years ago, but those designs were not highly integrated. Higher levels of integration began on single cores, and now developers are moving to integrated multicore designs. As a result Symbian understands multicore designs in what it considers to be a unique depth.

Turnabout’s fair play
Even as veteran RTOS vendors begin fielding tools, longtime tool supplier DDC-I has come out with Deos, a commercialized version of a Honeywell RTOS. Bob Morris, president and CEO of DDC-I, said the technology behind Deos “is on every plane flying today.”

DDC-I sells tools to developers in the MILS, aerospace, medical instrumentation and automotive markets.

Different vendors have different views of what matters and why, but they all agree that the top two trends are multicore and the move toward integrated product sets. Some vendors have a longer or deeper history serving specific markets. Some offer proprietary systems, some base their offerings on Linux, and some offer both.

From a development standpoint, making a choice among them can be difficult. Although speeds, feeds, footprint, performance and power consumption remain considerations, domain-relevant optimization can go a long way.

Related Search Term(s): embedded development, Linux, multicore, RTOS, virtualization, DDC-I, Enea, Green Hills, LynuxWorks, Mentor Graphics, MontaVista, QNX, Quadros, Symbian, Wind River

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Comments

01/12/2009 10:04:19 AM EST

Lisa, the QNX Neutrino RTOS isn't based on Linux. In fact, it embodies a very different approach to OS architecture -- the microkernel -- which enables a level of fault tolerance and dynamic upgradability that isn't possible with a monolithic OS like Linux. That said, QNX Neutrino and Linux both use POSIX APIs, so porting software between the two OSs is often quite simple. Also, QNX has been offering consulting services for a long time now. That said, your comments on QNX support for SMP and middleware are on the money. Cheers, - Paul at QNX

CanadaPaul Leroux

01/12/2009 05:04:43 PM EST

I just have to say the pictures in the magazine were hilarious. I really liked Raspberry Robot Rage but Military Maltball Madness made me laugh out loud.

United StatesDarrell

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