How important is Linux?

[ebarker]

Kevin,

That is a great question. No doubt there are some advocates pushing linux because it is linux.

I think the better question is what is the best platform for this target audience?

For many users the code is input->process->output. The input being external I/O or the telemetry stream and vicey versey. That is even true for the camera and such. What I trying to say is the most users don't deal with interrupt driven routines or 'hard real time' requirements.

Momentarily ignoring things like interrupt driven pulse counters the user could write a plain old gnu app that interfaced to the external world via a kernel drive (supplied).

One downside is the development environment just got a whole lot bigger (relative to MPLab) plus it is more difficult for this level of user to hook custom hardware to the software or to configure some I/O pins.

I'm not sure that chasing an RTOS for this audience is a good idea. The linux idea has plus and minus points. I'm not too sure the plus'es outweigh the minuses primarily because of what it takes to get to the hardware.

I write linux kernel drivers to do I/O to the world and it ain't trivial. (Kevin already knows this isn't trivial because he is Kevin).

What say you world out there ?