VxWorks and RTLinux are RTOSs. You may have been thinking of WIND's Tornado suite of tools, not VxWorks, when you mention that WIND could port VxWorks to Linux. Perhaps you are meaning that as a host platform for a development environment, like NT or UNIX, it makes sense for WIND to support Linux. In this case though, it has nothing to do with RTLinux competing tet-a-tet VxWorks.
You do bring up an interesting point regarding the nature of Linux and how WIND competes in the embedded market vis-a-vis roll-your-owns. The fact is, roll-your-own is not *free*. It can be quite costly in terms of missed market windows, porting, maintenance issues, not to mention inhouse investment into OS expertise that cannot be leveraged because of business model constraints.
A growing contingent of companies developing embedded systems realize the benefits of relinquishing OS expertise to a third party, such as WIND because they recognize real $$$s being dumped down the drain otherwise. They are much better off focussing their resources on expertise that is specific to their product line that supports their business strategy.
The reverse side of this equation is at the heart of WIND's value proposition - encapsulating OS expertise and exploiting the associated intellectual property by propagating it across disparate applications at various companies. Within this context, it can be argued that VxWorks stands a pretty good chance regarding a threat of RTLinux since, as you stated, WIND has been quite successful in this type of environment for years.
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In my mind, what is at the heart of the RTLinux debate has more to do with the design fundamentals of Linux. VxWorks was designed as an RTOS. If the design of Linux lends itself to the real-time world, then WIND has another competitor on its hands. Even if Os's are designed to be embedded, such as CE, it does not necessarily portend a stroke of death to WIND. Where is realtime UNIX?, NT?, DOS? |
