The Performance Study And Comparison On Typical Embedded Operation Systems

As the developing of the semiconductor technology, the integration of the single-chip getting higher and the cost getting lower, the embedded system can on-board more memory, more peripherals and itself becomes much more powerful .At the same time, the usage of embedded systems are getting wider and wider in our daily life, and their functions are becoming a lot .All these above make the modern embedded systems get much more complicated than the ones in the old days .You can not imagine the software of these embedded systems could be started from the scratch ,or finished by a single engineer. You also got to find some way to manage so splendid peripherals in some normal way. And the time-to-market does not leave the engineers too much time to finish the integration of the applications into the whole system. These all require some sort of the framework, which the embedded systems can base on. And this framework should be portable, easy to team work, good device management, and real-time. So there is the embedded operation system, which give the good basement and infrastructure for the applications above.Since the embedded operation system is varied and application-dedicated ,we have to make the right choice of the embedded operation system at the very early stage of the system design .Or if there is no appreciated one on the market ,we have to make it by ourselves .So how to choose or how to design a suitable embedded operation system becomes a very key issue ,and we hereby choose two typical embedded operation systems , eCos and μ CLinux , as the subjects of our study. We want to study and compare the different aspects of two operation systems and see how the different parts of the embedded operation system will affect our choice and design more or less.In the study, we ported the two embedded operation systems to a common hardware platform .To make a good reference, we chose the AT76C120 reference design board, which is based on a popular consumer and communication RISC core ARM7TDMI, as our hardware platform. Also since the AT76C120 board has so many peripherals, this gives us a lot of choice to do the testing and evaluation.In the experiments, we are mainly from the following aspects to do our study .The portability, the basic performance, the application performance, the developing model and developing flexibility, and licensing and the cost are the aspects we are caring and studying.So we got the following results. At the basic performance and application performance , eCos is better than μ CLinux . eCos and n CLinux is almost the same at the portability and the system cost .But μ CLinux will get its plus at the developing model ,developing flexibility and licensing .So we can conclude at the different condition we should consider the different aspects of the embedded operation system more or less when making the choice of the embedded operation system. There is no absolute way to judge the goodness or badness of the embedded operation system.