Jim Turley, Editor-in-Chief of
Embedded Systems Design, lays out the survey data and discusses a number of interesting patterns in an article at
Embedded.com.
The survey looks at a cross-section of developers throughout North America, including software developers, hardware engineers, managers, and program directors. Those surveyed were chosen randomly from three sources -- subscribers to
Embedded Systems Design magazine, attendees of the Embedded Systems Conferences, and readers of
EE Times who are working on embedded projects -- and the respondents were evenly split among software, hardware, and system-level job functions, and widely spread among different industries and business segments, Turley reports.
The survey asked about more than 25 different commercial OSes, as well as non-commerical Linux, in-house, and proprietary alternatives, and Turley analyzes the results. Among his findings:
- Many projects use no OS -- More than a quarter of embedded systems now in development won't have an OS at all. The no-OS percentage was highest among those developing consumer electronics (40 percent), and lowest (16 percent) for those developing computer peripherals. "Interestingly," notes Turley, "on-the-job experience seems to play a role in operating-system usage. The more experienced the developer, the more likely he or she was to employ an OS in the current project."
- Half who use an OS use a commercial OS -- Among those who do use an OS, 51 percent of developers surveyed use a commercial off-the-shelf OS, and 21 percent use a proprietary in-house OS. After that, 16 percent use an open-source OS, and 11.8 percent use "a commercial distribution of an open-source OS. In other words: Linux."
- Top commercial RTOS brands -- VxWorks, Windows XP Embedded, Windows CE emerged as the top three commercially supplied embedded OSes used in current projects by developers.
Regarding the last of the above observations, Turley includes a chart (
click here to see the chart) that demonstrates the relative ranking of each commercially-supplied embedded OS developers are using.
Turley neglects to mention a couple of key points in his discussion of the aforementioned chart.
One, is that the two Microsoft "Windows Embedded" operating systems -- Windows CE and Windows XP Embedded -- together make Windows variants the single most popular platform, and Microsoft the most popular embedded OS vendor, at 36 percent. The following two graphs, which are based on the CMP chart's data, illustrate this observation.
Windows CE and Windows XP Embedded rank 2nd and 3rd among commercially-supplied embedded OSes
(Data source: CMP media 2006 survey results)
Microsoft tops the list of vendors of commercially-supplied embedded OSes, when Windows CE and Windows XP Embedded are stacked together
(Data source: CMP media 2006 survey results)
The other missed point, to be fair, is that the multiple commercial Linux vendors (Red Hat, MontaVista, Bluecat, Linux/RT, RTLinux, and RT NELinux) along with open-source Linux can logically be combined into a much taller bar than what is shown for Red Hat in the first of the above graphs, as
LinuxDevices has
has pointed out. This results in the observation that Linux currently remains the most-used embedded operating system (
LinuxDevices does the math, so we won't go into it here).
Regarding Linux, Turley observes that some disillusionment seems to have set in regarding open source. "Last year's respondents seemed considerably more optimistic about Linux; this year's open-source plans are much more subdued," he writes.
A few other interesting tidbits that make Turley's analysis a worthwile read include:
- Larger organizations tend to use operating systems in their products more often than smaller companies do.
- A significant number of developers don't use operating systems because they are too complicated. "Note that this final group didn't say that an OS was too complicated for their system (in other words, technical overkill). They said it was too complicated for them, personally."
- Commercial operating systems are more popular than ever, and are gaining ground, mostly at the expense of home-grown OSes.
- Companies moving from an in-house OS expect to move to one of the smaller commercial alternatives, not one of the leaders.
- Decision factors that rank high in choosing an OS include "ecosystem" issues such as the availability of software tools that affect the quality of the developer's life. "Non-technical criteria like support, trust, and reputation play an ever-larger role in previously technical decisions. Vendors, take note."
Read the complete article by Jim Turley
here.
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