How important is Linux?

[Kevin Sevcik]

I think it's assumed that if we're running an RTOS on the controller, then we'll have more than enough processing power left over to do many interesting things. Honestly, once you've made that decision, it's rather easy to get enough power to do whatever you want. Freescale has some 32-bit automotive processors (MAC7101) that run 50+MHz and could support 16 PWM channels on chip with no interrupts along with A/D, 2 SPI channels and a host of other nice features. Actually, after looking over that random processor I hunted up at Freescale, I'm almost drooling over the sorts of things that could be done with it. The real problem is just the development time to get something like that up and running. And even more importantly, making absolutely sure the users can't shoot themselves in the foot and get the controller into a completely unrecoverable state via bad programming. I think the amount of development and debugging necessary for something like this would be the primary hurdle to get over, but I have to say it'd probably make programming a lot easier in the long run.