Operating systems
As you might expect for a survey of embedded developers, there were lots of questions pertaining to operating systems. One that caught my eye was "If your current embedded project doesn't use an operating system (OS), real-time OS (RTOS), kernel, software executive, or scheduler of any kind, why not?" This is shown in Figure 6.

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The top answer--my project didn't require it--didn't come as a surprise, and it pretty much remained the same from previous studies. But the response I found interesting was "the OS requires too much processing power." This number is down from last year, which was down from the year before. That's a good thing, as it shows that users are taking advantage of the performance offered by the processor vendors. Those vendors always talk about how much performance they offer, and it seems like users are jumping onto the bandwagon, even if it's in small increments.

Barr adds, "It's nice that 'too expensive,' 'too complicated,' and 'too much memory' are all going away as excuses."

The use of commercial operating systems, shown in Figure 7, reveals an interesting trend. Here, we show data from the previous four years, as it might be misleading to just look at this year versus last year. The four year trend of commercial OSes that developers plan to use is going down (even though it's up slightly in 2008 when compared with 2007). There's also a significant drop in the use of noncommercial OSes. That should certainly raise a red flag with the commercial OS vendors.

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Barr was also quick to spot this trend, one he dubbed "very, very interesting. And Linux/open source doesn't explain that change--either in the unsupported or commercially sold variants."

For those who do employ a commercial operating system, we asked them why they did so, as shown in Figure 8. Frankly, this question left me scratching my head more than any other. From 2005 to 2007, the response "overall cost" declined. However, this year, it increased. That's likely a result of the poor economy we're mired in. A huge decline comes in "real-time capability." Where I'm really left wondering is why there would be significant declines in real-time capability, tech support, good software tools, and processor or hardware compatibility.

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"The piece of data here that's potentially significant is the processor or hardware compatibility," explains Jack Ganssle, industry consultant and regular contributor to Embedded System Design and Embedded.com, whom I consulted to get a better understanding of these responses. Jack said, "I can read this data in one of a few ways, but one take on this is the decreasing importance of instruction set architectures. X86, PPC, ARM--who really cares? It's all in C so things are pretty compatible."

Next, we asked what the most important factors in selecting any OS are (as opposed to just commercial OSes), as you can see in Figure 9. Again, I scratch my head, because the answers are inconsistent with the previous question (Figure 8). It does, however, seem to validate the data. Barr claims that the excuses for not using an RTOS are going away.

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