[luau] another interesting thing I found on another list

[Charles Lockhart]

Sorry, if I'm breeching protocol with crossover, please flame me privately.

This article:

http://www.embedded.com/story/OEG20021202S0052

was causing a bit of anger and disgust on another list, and I could 
pretty much see why.  This guy has 15 years of working experience with 
vxWorks, none with embedded Linux, or even with Linux in general as far 
as I could tell.

His complaint was that embedded Linux is touted as being free, but it 
wasn't.  But generally he and his team made a bunch of bad choices in 
terms of system design, and he was publicly penalizing embedded Linux 
for these.

Example, he complained that while e-Linux is touted as being free, he 
had to pay a consulting group a lot of bucks to port the kernel to the 
uP that they'd selected.  I think an obvious no-brainer would have been 
to choose a uP that's already supported rather than taking the risk of 
going off into the great unknown.

Other complaints that he made:

They had to re-write some Linux drivers because again, they weren't 
supported for the uP they chose.

The consulting group ported the kernel for some reference design that 
was available for the uP, and so they then had to spend time(=money) 
cusomizing for their custom hardware design.

While I agree that in some ways Linux dev is a bit like trying to hit a 
moving target, the problem was amplified because they kept recieving 
kernel updates from their consultants, and they kept updating their 
kernel rather than freezing it, resulting in having to rewrite some of 
their driver code multiple times.  Again, the no-brainer I think would 
have been to focus on a snapshot of what they needed, and only fold in 
kernel mods that would fix problems.  Plus, in my mind I associated this 
as a problem with the consultants, not e-Linux.

The author had to recompile gcc as a cross compiler for his uP, which he 
thought was a pain.

The author had a harder time getting some things working using e-Linux 
than he did with vxWorks.  But they were things like applications to 
convert the kernel + applications into a ROMable image, stuff that I've 
seen available on the net before.  My thinking was that if he had 15 
years worth of experience with Linux these things would have been just 
as easy.

Anyway, I generally like reading about peoples experiences with embedded 
Linux and Linux as applied to science, so I apreciated the article, I 
just wish it would have been more objective, and not so much playing the 
blame game.  One point he made was that they failed to make the date for 
demoing the product to their customers, and he pretty much intimated 
this was e-Linux's fault, which I thought was pretty bogus.

-Charles