What is it?
Embedded Linux is an open source operating system used in
mobile phones,
personal digital assistants, media players and other consumer
devices.
Linux on mobile devices has followed a similar path to desktop
Linux. This time last year, six different consortia and companies
were working on Linux for mobile phones, and far from offering any
prospect of convergence, their approaches were actually taking them
further apart.
Big suppliers are beginning to consolidate around certain
initiatives. In April, Intel announced that it wanted to offer
Linux as an alternative operating system for its next generation of
mobile internet devices, which are due to arrive in 2008.
Analyst firm Gartner said, "Although the consumer is unlikely to
care what operating system is running on the mobile internet
device, the device cannot succeed without attracting a development
community to create a robust platform at an affordable price
point." Intel would therefore be setting out to create a "strong
Linux ecosystem".
In June, the Linux Phone Standards consortium announced a key
part of its 1.0 specification. The consortium includes companies
such as Trolltech and
MontaVista, the supplier of the version of Linux used by phone
maker Motorola, among many others.
Motorola in turn is a member of the LiMo Foundation, along with
NEC, Panasonic, Samsung, DoCoMo and Vodafone, which aims to
establish a set of interfaces and standard reference components to
increase the number of third-party developers for mobile
devices.
Motorola has also joined the Eclipse Foundation as a strategic
developer member, and it is helping to kick off an Eclipse Tools
for Mobile Linux project to provide the extensible frameworks and
tools for developing C++ applications for mobile devices.
Where did it originate?
Linus Torvalds first asked for help with his free operating
system kernel in 1991. Since then it has grown from a small number
of C files to about 40Mbytes of source code under the
GNU General Public Licence. Embedded Linux started to take off
in 2003.
What's it for?
Embedded Linux uses the Linux kernel with a limited set of
software utilities.
The creators of the Debian Linux distribution described the
process of creating its embedded version, Emdebian: "This is
essentially standard Debian optimised for size translations are
split into dedicated packages rather than forcing all translations
on to all users, documentation and examples and similar extraneous
guff is left out, and library dependencies are reduced as far as
possible."
Many of the Linux distributions have an embedded counterpart for
example, Red Hat's Embedded Linux, MontaVista's Hard Hat Linux,
Embedded Gentoo, and a forthcoming version of Ubuntu for embedded
and mobile devices, which will be tailored for Intel's mobile
internet device.
What makes it special?
The new generation of phones such as Motorola's RIZR Z6 will be
able to run Linux on a single-processor architecture. Previous
phones had to have a dual processor, with one running a real-time
operating system while the other acted as an applications
processor. Montavista's Mobilinux now supports single-processor
architectures.
How difficult is it to master?
If you already have Linux skills, you can learn Embedded Linux
on a three-day course. Developers need to learn how to get the
maximum performance from limited resources, writing closer to the
hardware than they will be used to.
What's coming up?
The rest of the Linux Phone Standards 1.0 specification is due
to be released later this year.