Re: MontaVista opinions?

cpope wrote:

That's a good point. I should be clear that I'm down on Xilinx and MV not
Linux. I'm a big advocate of Linux.

For a couple hundred bucks in parts I have a system now with 2.6 level
kernel and USB host functionality where I can plug in flash drives, blue
tooth headsets, wireless lan cards, gps receivers, etc. I can control it
with raw USB, serial port, PPP over serial, TCP/IP, bluetooth, etc. I can
run a web sever, telnet into it, nsf mount drives over to it, etc. None of
the other OSes out there come close to this level of functionality. That's
why in my opinion they always pimp "real time" issues to convince people
that stock Linux is inadequate. The truth is as long as you architect your
system correctly "real time" is a non-issue.

All true.

real-time, or at least task prioritization of any kind, can be an issue. With some of the other OSs eg Integrity, you can partition up the available CPU time so tasks always get a fixed number of CPU cycles to work with. Priorities in Linux are a bit on the fiddly side.

So yeah, I wouldn't want to own stock in any boutique OS company trying to
get by charging per unit licensing fees. In fact, MV probably has the right
business model it's just that they haven't done their technical work very
well.

My experience with Montavista has been okay; on some occasions I've had kernel developers (who are on their payroll) step in to help with support calls. You won't get that for free, I can tell you. What I suspect is that support is better on some architectures than others; this is true of Linux itself. Out of all the possible embedded CPUs (other than x86), PPC is probably the best supported in the kernel.
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