June 2000
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Embedded Linux

Small is big

Embedded Linux poised for greatness

Summary
Eileen Cohen attends the first Embedded Linux Expo & Conference and mingles with designers of devices looking for (and finding!) a robust and royalty-free OS. (1,600 words)

By Eileen Cohen

inux exhibitions -- whether for hackers, suits, or gun nuts -- crop up as frequently as dandelions these days. However, the first Embedded Linux Expo & Conference (ELEC), held June 22 in San Jose, Calif., had a distinctly novel feeling to it. Attendees of the small but sold-out one-day event (240 at the conference and at least 500 at the expo) were clearly not the Linux faithful who wistfully wonder whether you can make money with open source. They were from a burgeoning industry sector, and were dead serious about learning how they could use open source to build products and make money.

The attendee seated to my right during the opening keynote address was a case in point. She was involved in a startup that needed an embedded operating system for its products. As a startup, she said, her firm can't afford the expensive royalty payment that many proprietary embedded-OS vendors would demand. An open source OS, on which she said "everybody can develop their technology," is therefore the logical choice. (And, she added, Windows CE isn't good enough.) While her company considered going the FreeBSD route, it chose Linux because Linux's development efforts are "better organized."

Before I could catch my neighbor's name, Rick Lehrbaum, technical chair for ELEC, introduced himself to the crowd while the conference staff hustled to bring more chairs into the overflowing room. Lehrbaum himself existed in another universe of technology before becoming an advocate of Linux. (In fact, he smilingly cautioned the audience not to ask him anything about Linux.) Lehrbaum was a co-founder of Ampro Computers, a maker of single-board computers and the progenitor of the popular PC/104 embedded PC standard. Last summer, when his college-age son interned at Ampro and commuted to work with him, Lehrbaum learned a thing or two about Linux in the car and started seeing worlds collide.

Rather than try to develop software products, Lehrbaum decided to "go all the way to virtual" and provide resources for those who want to use Linux for embedded computing. LinuxDevices.com (see Resources), now part of ZDNet but still very much Lehrbaum's creation, is the highly effective result.

Along the way, Lehrbaum facilitated the formation of the Embedded Linux Consortium, a trade association for the advancement of Linux in the embedded, applied, and appliance computing markets. He is also the force behind ELEC, which he proposed to the RTC Group, a company that has been producing trade shows in the embedded-computing industry for several years. ELEC was co-located with the RTC Group's Embedded Computing Show.

Lehrbaum said the number of quality submissions to the conference was so high that he decided to forgo his own presentation on the embedded Linux market. Fortunately, slides from the version that he presented at Linux Canada in May are available at LinuxDevices.com (see Resources) and can provide a good sense of what the excitement over embedded Linux is all about.

Two billion chips waiting for instructions
Among the startling facts that Lehrbaum relates in his presentation is that less than 20 percent of the computer chips manufactured each year go into computers. Therefore, one to two billion CPUs each year are designed into embedded systems. This is an especially opportune time for Linux to become the OS of choice for many of the tens of thousands of new embedded designs that emerge each year -- you can find out why in Rick Cook's "Embedded Linux Basics" article in LinuxWorld. (See Resources.)

The engagingly brainy Michael Tiemann, chief technical officer of Red Hat and co-founder of Cygnus Solutions, delivered the ELEC's main keynote address, entitled "Embedded Linux and Other Revolutionary Combinations." Tiemann, speaking about the connectivity revolution -- by 2005 it's predicted that more people will connect to the Internet with non-PC devices than with PCs -- began with the statement that technological revolutions often result from the collision of two evolutionary paths.

For example, when Sun combined the concept of filesystems and the concept of networks, a revolution was born. Linux itself, Tiemann told the audience, "is not going to revolutionize our industry, your industry, or the customer's experience. But it can be a key ingredient [in the connectivity revolution] because it has many of the properties -- the free radicals -- that are needed to combine with other chemistr[ies] in interesting ways."

The crux of Tiemann's message was that one of the chemical reactions he believes to be imminent is between embedded systems and client/server architectures. The non-embedded computing world has put years of effort into partitioning systems between computing that happens at the client and computing that happens at the server. This knowledge hasn't yet "crossed the intellectual chasm" into the embedded space. As consumers look for a broader range of capabilities in devices, Tiemann said, companies will want to implement families of solutions that can support a wide range of such partitioning. "If we design our systems without thinking about that kind of scalability and that kind of partitioning, we'll probably end up with a mismatch between clients and servers which at the end of the day is not compelling to the customer."

Where does Linux factor into all of this? Tiemann believes the successful combination of embedded and client/server will come through open and flexible partitioning paradigms made possible with open standards documents and configuration tools. "In the open source community, it's the excellence of design and implementation that becomes the standard, and then everybody who wants the standard can have the standard. The people who are going to be part of the collective, as opposed to the fragmented, market are the people who are using open protocols and who are designing not just interoperability, but making it possible to partition and provision how clients and servers connect and cooperate." Of course, Tiemann acknowledged, there's an "interesting competitive dynamic," in which everyone wants their solution to be the standard.

Tiemann shared an amazing fact to illustrate the magnitude of the connectivity revolution from the point of view of the marketplace. In discussions with "a major networking company," he learned that every new device that connects to the Internet, whether or not it is one of that company's products, represents a $7-per-year annuity to that company's business. (Anyone guessing Cisco?)

The keynote was followed by technical presentations from system architects, CTOs, and CEOs from major embedded-Linux companies, as well as an afternoon keynote entitled "Linux -- The Embedded Cinderella" from Jim Ready, CEO and founder of MontaVista. I also stuck around for "High Availability on Embedded Linux," delivered by Mitch Bunell, CTO of LynuxWorks. Bunell led the audience through a mind-boggling array of slides illustrating numerous techniques for improving availability in embedded systems independent of hardware redundancy. The importance of employing high-availability techniques increases as more software (including a bigger-footprint OS like Linux) is being put into devices, Bunell explained, especially since 60 percent of faults are software faults. My neighbor to the right scribbled furiously throughout the talk.

Later, Venky Krishnan of HP Labs gave a presentation on building a Linux-based Internet-appliance radio; Tim Bird, CTO of Lineo, talked about "Right-Sizing Linux for Embedded Devices;" Victor Yodaiken, president of FSMLabs, spoke about realtime Linux; and Greg Haerr, CEO of Century Software, presented on the Microwindows Project, an open source graphical windowing environment for embedded Linux systems.

See and be seen
After the presentations, it was time to head to the exhibit floor. On the way, I asked Warren Greving, part of a contingent from Hewlett-Packard's Advanced Technology Group, why they were at ELEC. "Linux is a very, very strong influence and force in the industry right now," replied Greving. "Understanding how it fits into the embedded world is very important at HP."

Noting that half of HP's business comes from products -- printers -- that employ embedded systems, Greving said the value of the conference for his group was "to see who's here, and then maybe interact with people here who are involved in the same parts of their business as we are." The "see who's here" theme reverberated in conversations I had with other attendees and vendors.

The 28 tabletop exhibits at ELEC were opposite a similar number of vendors exhibiting proprietary wares for the embedded marketplace as part of the Embedded Computing Show. The Linux side bustled with conversation and rubbernecking. Companies offering a wide range of technologies for embedded systems -- microprocessor boards, embedded microkernels, consumer devices, development tools, and, of course, embedded-Linux products and services -- vied for attention.

"We came just for visibility," said Roger Vaught, an accounts manager for Centura Software Corp., one of the first embedded-data-management companies to support Linux. "But we're meeting a lot of our prospects. It's turning out to be a good day."

After the conference, Rick Lehrbaum expressed unmitigated delight at its success: "Amazing! Standing room only! Awesome! However, it's not that surprising to me, since everything I've done with embedded Linux has exceeded my expectations." The second ELEC will take place in Framingham, Mass., near Boston, on Oct. 27, 2000. (The show was shifted from Toronto thanks to increased interest.) Lehrbaum hopes to repeat some presentations from the first ELEC and to include others, based on good proposals, that were left out due to time constraints.

Either way, attendees can count on solid technical presentations from key industry players. "There is no other conference exclusively devoted to embedded Linux," Lehrbaum said. "Most talks you can hear anywhere else [on embedded Linux] are thinly veiled product pitches. I was very firm with the presenters that their technical presentations needed to be useful content for the attendees and not dependent on using the presenters' products."

Linuxworld reports from the first Embedded Linux Expo & Conference.

Small is big

Embedded Linux poised for greatness