Commercial embedded Linux: prototype to production

Commercial embedded Linux is a customisable solution with long-term support and maintenance at a low cost

Why Commercial Embedded Linux?

Commercial Embedded Linux Overview

Utilising a commercially supported embedded Linux solution, like Wind River Linux, provides significantly reduced technical, business, and legal risks along with full-development lifecycle services.

Wind River utilises a core framework  provided by the OpenEmbedded and the Yocto Project enabling both economies of scale in terms of support and highly customised builds that exactly fit project requirements.

Benefits of Commercial Embedded Linux

By using a commercially-supported solution, you remove many of the resource-heavy headaches associated with maintaining and supporting a roll-your-own version of embedded Linux. Commercial embedded Linux provides you with:

• Long-term savings: Using a commercial offering that includes support and maintenance is significantly more cost-effective than maintaining your own customised solution in-house. Linux is a sprawling platform that requires significant effort from your engineers to provide the support, patches, and security vulnerability management that is required. Plus, as more interconnected IoT devices are deployed Linux vulnerabilities have become more widespread. Commercial embedded Linux vendors have the resources necessary to identify and remediate these threats with regular product updates, maintenance, and security patches.
• Faster time-to-market: Commercial embedded Linux also offers opportunities to speed up the development process and get to market faster. Board Support Packages (BSPs) are readily available and provide a polished development and production environment with increased reliability and quality compared to building your own drivers and hardware support packages. Cloud-native architecture and container technology provide support for teams looking to use hardware-independent platforms, reuse code, improve maintenance efficiency, and optimise resource utilisation. Lastly, commercial embedded Linux is accompanied by value-added development tools that go beyond standard open-source and help increase developer efficiency.
• Simplified compliance: There’s more than just labor and technical costs to consider, using commercial embedded Linux mitigates the risk of legal liability associated with licensing by providing comprehensive compliance review and reporting. It also helps with export compliance and encryption disclosure as you work on products to be distributed internationally.

Find the Right Commercial Embedded Linux Partner

Commercial embedded Linux offers a clear return on investment compared to other available Linux offerings. The total cost of ownership as well as the technical, business, and legal risks are much lower with a commercially-supported solution than roll-your-own. The ability of the commercial embedded Linux vendor to supply training, services, maintenance, and support greatly increases productivity and also reduces the overhead of maintaining your own, unique, embedded Linux distribution.

Finding the right commercial embedded Linux partner is critical to project success. Wind River is the leading provider of the commercial embedded Linux market. We offer carrier-grade Linux with 99.9999% availability, clustering, security, virtual routing and forwarding (VRF), test suites and more.

Blog courtesy of Wind River, if you are interested in exploring the possibilities and benefits of commercial embedded Linux download it's free eBook.