I was recently approached for help by a Mentor Graphics customer, who was planning a new project and needed to select an operating system. They wanted guidance with that choice. Of course, one is tempted to say that it does not matter which of our products they chose (as, between them, Nucleus RTOS and Mentor Embedded Linux do cover most possibilities), but I felt they needed something more objective.

There is actually a huge choice. Given that it is decided to purchase an OS, instead of developing something in-house (an expensive option which rarely makes sense), there is the choice between the “heavyweight” OSes, like Windows CE and various flavors of Linux, and around 200 other, mostly real time (RTOS), products. What the customer was after was a simple decision driven process, like a flowchart … (more…)