An Investigation of Migrating from Proprietary RTOS to Embedded Linux

Embedded systems and the open source operating system
Linux have been going hand in hand for a long time now.
Companies using Linux for their embedded products are
praising it for being time and cost efficient when it comes to
performance and maintainability. Another solution for embedded
systems is a Real-Time Operating System (RTOS).
The goal of this this paper is to investigate whether a traditional
proprietary RTOS can be substituted with embedded
Linux, and if this kind of migration can lead to reduced licensing
costs and increased general quality of the system.
We used a qualitative research method for this case-study.
The investigation was conducted with interviews as the main
source of information. The result of this study is an empirical
model we named ’Embedded Linux Adoption Model’.
We concluded that in many cases a proprietary RTOS can
be substituted with embedded Linux without affecting the
critical needs of the system. The study also showed that
many embedded system developers are very receptive to
open source solutions and could think of contributing to the
community.