Hey everyone,

I'm finishing up my slides for ELC Europe, and I thought for some fun I'd
introduce a new section in my talk. This is my perennial "Status of Embedded
Linux" talk, and I usually give information about technologies that are
recently introduced or under development for the Linux kernel or embedded
systems, distros, etc.

For this talk, I thought I'd highlight some products that are at the extreme
edge of system size, boot time, or (some other interesting metric), as an indication
of where the industry is at.

Can anyone point me to products (not dev boards or internal demos) with
1) really small memory footprint
2) really quick boot time (all the way to customer use of the product)
3) some other extreme (lowest end processor, hardest realtime, longest
battery life, etc.)

Let me know if you've heard of something, or have done something.
I may have to separate answers into product categories, since these
attributes are affected enormously by the user-space stack.

Thanks for any info you can provide.
-- Tim

Hello Tim, All,

On 2013-10-09 21:28 +0200, Bird, Tim spake thusly:

I'm finishing up my slides for ELC Europe, and I thought for some fun I'd
introduce a new section in my talk. This is my perennial "Status of Embedded
Linux" talk, and I usually give information about technologies that are
recently introduced or under development for the Linux kernel or embedded
systems, distros, etc.

For this talk, I thought I'd highlight some products that are at the extreme
edge of system size, boot time, or (some other interesting metric), as an indication
of where the industry is at.

Can anyone point me to products (not dev boards or internal demos) with
1) really small memory footprint
2) really quick boot time (all the way to customer use of the product)
3) some other extreme (lowest end processor, hardest realtime, longest
battery life, etc.)

Let me know if you've heard of something, or have done something.
I may have to separate answers into product categories, since these
attributes are affected enormously by the user-space stack.

Not sure it really applies, but there was this crazy (russian?) guy who
managed to run Linux on an 8-bit micro-controller:
http://dmitry.gr/index.php?r=05.Projects&proj=07.%20Linux%20on%208bit

TL;DR: the guy wrote a basic VM running on a 8-bit AVR, emulating the ARM
instruction set (armv5, PXA255), runs a small hypervisor to provide basic
functionality via hypercalls.

That was just for the fun of it, not an actual product, but it shows how
much the Linux kernel is versatile, and how enthusiast (and crazy!) the
community can be!

See you soon in Edimburgh! :-)

Regards,
Yann E. MORIN.

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On Wednesday, October 09, 2013 2:22 PM, Yann E. MORIN wrote:

Not sure it really applies, but there was this crazy (russian?) guy who
managed to run Linux on an 8-bit micro-controller:
http://dmitry.gr/index.php?r=05.Projects&proj=07.%20Linux%20on%208bit

TL;DR: the guy wrote a basic VM running on a 8-bit AVR, emulating the ARM
instruction set (armv5, PXA255), runs a small hypervisor to provide basic
functionality via hypercalls.

That was just for the fun of it, not an actual product, but it shows how
much the Linux kernel is versatile, and how enthusiast (and crazy!) the
community can be!

OK. That's pretty crazy. I should start a "bizarre Linux implementations"
page on the elinux wiki. This could go next to the Javascript implementation:
http://bellard.org/jslinux/

Thanks!
-- Tim