The SD Times asks: “Should embedded Linux be standardized?” The article, by Edward J. Correia, discusses fragmentation and industry standards and focuses on standardization efforts from the Embedded Linux Consortium (ELC) and the newer Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF).

The article first looks at the ELC, which has seen its membership drop from more than 100 companies to nine since being formed in March, 2002. The ELC succeeded, in Februrary 2003, in publishing its ELCPS, a platform specification intended to define embedded system application programming environments and standardize user interface, real-time, and power management. The article suggests that the ELCPS failed to gain traction in large measure because, as SnapGear GM Rick Stevenson is quoted as saying, “A consistent Linux platform is pretty much guaranteed by the kernel anyway."

The Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF), meanwhile, continues to enjoy increasing momentum since forming in June, 2003. CELF works less like the ELC and more like the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), according to the article, assembling large customers to codify best practices and identify areas that, if improved, would benefit everyone. CELF has gained many new members since being formed, and published its source tree in December, 2003.

The article then discusses the danger of fragmentation. Correia speaks with FSMLabs CEO Victor Yodaiken, who points out that ITRON, an embedded operating system popular in consumer electronics devices in Asia, has fragmented into hundreds of mutually incompatible forks. FSMLabs has stuck with the ELC, according to Yodaiken, because “The standards work that we did serves to expand the market for third-party applications. Vendors know that what they write will run on all varieties of embedded Linux. [And,] if a customer asks if our real-time core will run on their board running embedded Linux using whatever profile, we know immediately whether or not our application runs,” Yodaiken is quoted as saying.

Michel Genard, of embedded OS and tools giant Wind River, points out that fragmentation would make embedded Linux too expensive, since companies couldn't share development costs between incompatible forks. According to the article, Genard says that when Wind River decided to get behind embedded Linux, it also chose to join CELF and the OSDL because it saw these organizations driving the efforts to standardize embedded Linux.

MontaVista, meanwhile, which recently claimed to be the embedded Linux marketshare leader, continues to conform to the ELCPS, the article says. MontaVista also tries to get as much of its technology as possible accepted into the mainstream Linux kernel, according to MontaVista's Scott Hedrick, because this effectively equates to standardization. “Linus [Torvalds] is the ultimate standards organization for Linux,” Hedrick is quoted as saying.

The article says Genard asserts that a standard kernel is not enough to prevent fragmentation, though, because Linux comprises so much more. “Which compiler will you use? Which C library and package will you include or exclude? You have a lot of options to make it a full operating system, and you have a risk of fragmentation if you don't define some group or industry boundaries."

The article concludes with a quote from Yodaiken, who points out that ITRON forked, ultimately, because of competitive pressures among all the different companies using it. “If people adapt their applications to run on a particular device, it will be harder to move [those apps] to a competitor's device if the operating system is not the same,” Yodaiken is quoted as saying.

Read the complete SD Times article here.

 
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