Hello Rich, and everybody else, Happy New Year! On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 01:16:53PM -0500, Rich Freeman wrote: > On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 1:06 PM, Tom H <tomh0...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Samsung's starting to release Tizen-driven phones, TVs, white goods, > > etc. Tizen uses systemd and, given the size of Samsung, the number of > > systemd embedded devices is going to skyrocket in the next few years. > > Samsung wouldn't have chosen systemd for Tizen if it were too resource > > hungry for its use case. > Embedded is a pretty broad term, and it impacts all aspects of a > device's design. You can't really put a smartphone and a microwave in > the same category. > Phones actually have plenty of storage, RAM, and CPU by most embedded > standards. The main issue is battery use, which is mostly about > ensuring that your software isn't constantly waking up the CPU. If > systemd is well-behaved in this regard I'd expect it to work on a > phone just fine. > The thing is that most devices that couldn't run systemd would > probably be hard-pressed to run any kind of generic linux distro in > any case. They might not even run linux, or if they did it might be a > super-stripped-down build with an embedded initramfs containing > nothing but a single executable built in C which runs as PID 1 (no > need for even filesystem support, let alone stuff like /proc and so > on). > I'm genuinely curious as to how systemd and competing solutions are > adopted in the embedded world, including phones but especially getting > beyond this (huge) niche. Just as a data point, the last project I worked on was an automotive system, whose controller was a 32-bit Power PC with 768k/64k code/data flash, and 64k RAM. It did not run systemd! Rather than Linux, it ran Autosar (a special, and somewhat wierd, OS specially for automotive products). The sensors in the system were even more constrained, using a special low-power processor with 16k flash and 1.5k RAM. They didn't run Linux either! In fact, they didn't have an OS - they were coded directly to the metal, in a single-tasked loop. My impression is that the embedded world is split roughly equally between large systems (like smart phones or infotainment systems where RAM is measured in gigabytes, and full scale OSs are used) and small systems (such as my automotive system, microwave ovens, TV zappers, elevator controllers, .... where special OSs, if any, are used, and RAM is measured in kilobytes). > I'm also curious as to where ChromeOS ends up going. It is based on > Gentoo, but runs Upstart (which isn't used by just about anybody else > now, and which isn't even in Gentoo's portage). > -- > Rich -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
