An investigation of migrating from proprietary RTOS to embedded Linux

Abstract

Embedded systems and the open source operating system Linux have been going hand in hand for a long time now. Companies using Linux for their embedded products are praising it for being time and cost efficient when it comes to performance and maintainability. Another solution for embedded systems is a Real-Time Operating System (RTOS). The goal of this this paper is to investigate whether a traditional proprietary RTOS can be substituted with embedded Linux, and if this kind of migration can lead to reduced licensing costs and increased general quality of the system. We used a qualitative research method for this case-study. The investigation was conducted with interviews as the main source of information. The result of this study is an empirical model we named 'Embedded Linux Adoption Model'. We concluded that in many cases a proprietary RTOS can be substituted with embedded Linux without affecting the critical needs of the system. The study also showed that many embedded system developers are very receptive to open source solutions and could think of contributing to the community.