MontaVista Software today delivered on a promise made last July, to offer a quick and easy way to convert embedded applications designed for Wind River's VxWorks operating system into embedded Linux applications.

Why do that? “This tool is a declaration of independence,” says MontaVista founder and CEO, Jim Ready. “Embedded system developers are tired of being tied to a single-vendor, proprietary solution.” Ready is no stranger to proprietary operating systems, having co-founded Hunter and Ready Systems (later called Ready Systems) in the mid 1980's in order to market VRTX, a component-like proprietary real-time kernel.

Ready's VRTX and Wind River's VxWorks soon grew to become arch rivals in the embedded operating system market. But several years after selling Ready Systems to embedded tools vendor Microtec, Ready decided to set about creating a new embedded software company. This time, though, he was to decry the proprietary approach and instead jump on an emerging bandwagon for open source software and Linux. The product: Hard Hat Linux, described by MontaVista as a “100 percent pure Linux, open source, royalty-free” operating system.

Last July, MontaVista unleashed its first direct attack on Wind River's proprietary OS customer base, in the form of a tool to convert applications based on pSOS, an embedded OS that Wind River gained through its early-2000 acquisition of Integrated Systems Inc., to run on Linux (see story).

“Wind River,” says Ready, “is the world's largest embedded software company.” And VxWorks, unlike pSOS, represents Wind River's core technology — the heart of its business. How large is the embedded software market? “Venture Development Corporation (VDC),” says Ready, “has sized the commercial embedded OS market at $1B in 1999. In addition, there are roughly another $1B worth of market opportunity currently being served by 'home grown' OSes.” Ready says Venture Development further estimates Wind River's VxWorks currently accounts for roughly 15% of the $1B commercial embedded OS market. Through this new tool, MontaVista is therefore targeting a roughly $150M market, which it hopes to penetrate by capitalizing on growing developer interest in using Linux and other open source software.

Founded last year, MontaVista is staking its fortunes on the premise that open source software in general, and Linux in specific, will be at the center of the next stage of software technology evolution. To date, the company has garnered over $35M in funding, and has grown its world-wide staff to nearly 150. Ready says the company will not be profitable for another 12-24 months, but that “revenues are running ahead of plan.” “We will have achieved around 80 design wins during 2000,” he adds. By design win, Ready is referring to the sale of at least one annual subscription to Hard Hat Linux, which typically goes for $12,000 in single (premium) seats. Most customers, however, have multiple developers and therefore require multiple seats, resulting in “hundreds of seats worth of revenue this year,” according to Ready.

How does it work?

The new VxWorks-to-Linux tool kit presents applications with a VxWorks “virtual machine” that emulates key system calls and behaviors of the VxWorks kernel on a standard Linux platform. Basically, a library of translations converts VxWorks application program interfaces (APIs) into functions that are compatible with Linux. MontaVista claims that source code utilizing VxWorks APIs can often be recompiled and run on Linux after little or no modification, other than minor changes to header files. According to Ready, “programmers should be able to convert VxWorks-based applications into ones that run on Hard Hat Linux in a handful of weeks.”

Emulating and/or translating all of the approximately 1500 API (application program interface) functions of VxWorks would have presented a severe challenge. However, MontaVista developers determined that it would be sufficient to limit their focus to roughly fifty of the most commonly used VxWorks APIs. The rest, they believe, fall into several categories that obviate the need for translation. The logic is as follows: a large number are already compatible with UNIX/POSIX APIs, and therefore are transparently supported by Linux; others, which configure and initialize the VxWorks environment, aren't needed under Linux; the balance are relatively obscure, and infrequently used.

Given the inherent complexities and sensitivities of embedded applications, Ready readily acknowledges that the new VxWorks-to-Linux tool kit isn't a magic bullet, however. “We don't claim that the process will be 100% automatic,” says Ready. In short: don't expect to simply process an application through the tool kit and have it be ready to boot up on Linux. More likely, it's going to take some effort. “Fortunately,” observes Ready, “most programmers, these days, design their applications in a relatively structured manner, and are therefore not irreparably tied to specific functions within VxWorks.” “Mainly,” he adds, “we needed to provide support for converting core VxWorks task management functions to Linux kernel functions — things like create threads.”

Where and when can I get it?

True to MontaVista's slogan, the new VxWorks-to-Linux tool kit is freely available in source code format. The company has established a dedicated website for the tool kit, at VxWorks2Linux.org, where the software is available for download. The tool kit will also be bundled with MontaVista's Hard Hat Linux Professional Developers Kit, which will include targeted and supported pre-built packages for each embedded processor that the Hard Hat distribution supports.

 
This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.