Why Embedded

Linux now spans the spectrum of computing applications for embedded world and there are endless articles on internet about embedded Linux. This article is the collection of some thoughts while teaching embedded Linux at Beijing University and lead related project. Hope it could be helpful for people with some computing background to ramp up on this domain.

Why Embedded?

The computers used to control equipment, otherwise known as embedded systems, have been around for about as long as computers themselves. They were first used back in the late 1960s in communications to control electromechanical telephone switches. Thousands Chinese engineers was working on digital exchange development in early 1990s, I was fresh at the time and lucky to be one of them. I was writing some boot code for 8086 board and play around with Logical analyzer everyday, but did not know the word “Embedded”. Only after several years working, I suddenly aware: this is embedded.

As the computer industry has moved toward ever smaller systems over the past decade or so, embedded systems have moved along with it, providing more capabilities for these tiny machines. Increasingly, these embedded systems need to be connected to some sort of network, and thus require a networking stack, which increases the complexity level and requires more memory and interfaces, as well as, you guessed it, the services of an operating system.

Off-the-shelf operating systems for embedded systems began to appear in the late 1970s, and today several dozen viable options are available. Out of these, a few major players have emerged, such as VxWorks, pSOS, Neculeus, and Windows CE.