In this article, Rick Lehrbaum describes a demo he observed at LinuxWorld in New York, where LynuxWorks previewed a new capability of the company's proprietary real-time operating system (RTOS), LynxOS — Linux “application binary interface” (ABI) compatibility. Lehrbaum writes . . .

In the early days of the IBM PC era, when you wanted to know if a system was “IBM PC compatible”, you'd try running Lotus Flight Simulator on it. That program exercised the system's hardware and software so thoroughly, and took enough liberties with undocumented and inadvisable functions (like writing directly to video RAM), that if Flight Simulator ran on the system you could pretty much count on it running any IBM PC compatible program.

Those days are long gone, and the new rage — at least in the embedded OS market — seems to have become Linux.

Recently at LinuxWorld in New York, LynuxWorks offered a sneak preview of a capability the company promised a little over a year ago — application binary interface compatibility of the company's proprietary real-time operating system (RTOS), LynxOS, with Linux. Well, whether or not LynxOS is truly ABI compatible with Linux remains to be seen — but at least it appeared to pass the “Quake Test.”

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