An embedded system is a computer system—a combination of a computer processor, computer memory, and input/output peripheral devices—that has a dedicated function within a larger mechanical or electronic system. It is embedded as part of a complete device often including electrical or electronic hardware and mechanical parts. Because an embedded system typically controls physical operations of the machine that it is embedded within, it often has real-time computing constraints. Embedded systems control many devices in common use today. In 2009, it was estimated that ninety-eight percent of all microprocessors manufactured were used in embedded systems.
MontaVista Software is a company that develops embedded Linux system software, development tools, and related software. Its products are made for other corporations developing embedded systems such as automotive electronics, communications equipment, mobile phones, and other electronic devices and infrastructure.
Nucleus RTOS is a real-time operating system (RTOS) produced by the Embedded Software Division of Mentor Graphics, a Siemens Business, supporting 32- and 64-bit embedded system platforms. The operating system (OS) is designed for real-time embedded systems for medical, industrial, consumer, aerospace, and Internet of things (IoT) uses. Nucleus was released first in 1993. The latest version is 3.x, and includes features such as power management, process model, 64-bit support, safety certification, and support for heterogeneous computing multi-core system on a chip (SOCs) processors.
Operating systems based on the Linux kernel are used in embedded systems such as consumer electronics, in-vehicle infotainment (IVI), networking equipment, machine control, industrial automation, navigation equipment, spacecraft flight software, and medical instruments in general.
DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework originally created by Sun Microsystems for troubleshooting kernel and application problems on production systems in real time. Originally developed for Solaris, it has since been released under the free Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) in OpenSolaris and its descendant illumos, and has been ported to several other Unix-like systems.
A free and open-source graphics device driver is a software stack which controls computer-graphics hardware and supports graphics-rendering application programming interfaces (APIs) and is released under a free and open-source software license. Graphics device drivers are written for specific hardware to work within a specific operating system kernel and to support a range of APIs used by applications to access the graphics hardware. They may also control output to the display if the display driver is part of the graphics hardware. Most free and open-source graphics device drivers are developed by the Mesa project. The driver is made up of a compiler, a rendering API, and software which manages access to the graphics hardware.
In the context of free and open-source software, proprietary software only available as a binary executable is referred to as a blob or binary blob. The term usually refers to a device driver module loaded into the kernel of an open-source operating system, and is sometimes also applied to code running outside the kernel, such as system firmware images, microcode updates, or userland programs. The term blob was first used in database management systems to describe a collection of binary data stored as a single entity.
Linux is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which includes the kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name "GNU/Linux" to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
In software engineering, tracing involves a specialized use of logging to record information about a program's execution. This information is typically used by programmers for debugging purposes, and additionally, depending on the type and detail of information contained in a trace log, by experienced system administrators or technical-support personnel and by software monitoring tools to diagnose common problems with software. Tracing is a cross-cutting concern.
In computing, SystemTap is a scripting language and tool for dynamically instrumenting running production Linux-based operating systems. System administrators can use SystemTap to extract, filter and summarize data in order to enable diagnosis of complex performance or functional problems.
TI-RTOS is an embedded tools ecosystem created and offered by Texas Instruments (TI) for use in a range of their embedded system processors. It includes a real-time operating system (RTOS) component named TI-RTOS Kernel, networking connectivity stacks, power management, file systems, instrumentation, and inter-processor communications like DSP/BIOS Link. It is free and open-source software, released under a BSD license.
Timesys Corporation is a company selling Linux open source software security, engineering services, and development tools, for the embedded software market. They also help software development teams build and maintain a custom Linux platform for embedded processors from integrated circuit manufacturers such as Atmel, Freescale, Intel, Texas Instruments, and Xilinx.
ELinOS is a commercial development environment for embedded Linux. It consists of a Linux distribution for the target embedded system and development tools for a development host computer. The development host computer usually is a standard desktop computer running Linux or Windows. The Linux system and the application software for the target device are both created on the development host.
BitBake is a much more complicated make-like build tool with the special focus of distributions and packages for embedded Linux cross compilation, although it is not limited to that. It is inspired by Portage, which is the package management system used by the Gentoo Linux distribution. BitBake existed for some time in the OpenEmbedded project until it was separated out into a standalone, maintained, distribution-independent tool. BitBake is co-maintained by the Yocto Project and the OpenEmbedded project.
Nvidia Optimus is a computer GPU switching technology created by Nvidia which, depending on the resource load generated by client software applications, will seamlessly switch between two graphics adapters within a computer system in order to provide either maximum performance or minimum power draw from the system's graphics rendering hardware.
wolfSSL is a small, portable, embedded SSL/TLS library targeted for use by embedded systems developers. It is an open source implementation of TLS written in the C programming language. It includes SSL/TLS client libraries and an SSL/TLS server implementation as well as support for multiple APIs, including those defined by SSL and TLS. wolfSSL also includes an OpenSSL compatibility interface with the most commonly used OpenSSL functions.
netsniff-ng is a free Linux network analyzer and networking toolkit originally written by Daniel Borkmann. Its gain of performance is reached by zero-copy mechanisms for network packets, so that the Linux kernel does not need to copy packets from kernel space to user space via system calls such as recvmsg . libpcap, starting with release 1.0.0, also supports the zero-copy mechanism on Linux for capturing (RX_RING), so programs using libpcap also use that mechanism on Linux.
perf is a performance analyzing tool in Linux, available from Linux kernel version 2.6.31 in 2009. Userspace controlling utility, named perf, is accessed from the command line and provides a number of subcommands; it is capable of statistical profiling of the entire system.
ROCm is an Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) software stack for graphics processing unit (GPU) programming. ROCm spans several domains: general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU), high performance computing (HPC), heterogeneous computing. It offers several programming models: HIP, OpenMP/Message Passing Interface (MPI), OpenCL.
