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from the next-up-are-mcot-msofa-and-mrecliner dept.
Reported last week at the BBC, CNet and IEEE Spectrum is the news that ARM is launching a new OS targeting low power, low footprint devices.
The operating system, called mbed OS, is meant to resolve productivity problems that arise from fragmentation—where different devices in the so-called “Internet of things” (IoT) market run on a hodgepodge of different protocols. ARM is looking to consolidate those devices under a single software layer that's simple, secure, and free for all manufacturers to use.
(Although the IEEE article reports that "this is the first operating system ARM has ever developed", that slightly glosses over the history of RiscOS by Acorn, of which ARM was a subsidiary.)
The software comes as a free "mbed OS" and a licensable "Device server". Although parts of the OS will be open source:
ARM says it wants to retain control of other parts to ensure mbed remains unfragmented
More technical details at the mbed developer site. One oddity is the Online Toolchain, which provides the device IDE and version control online.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Tuesday October 07 2014, @05:16PM
And why a new OS? NetBSD was made for this. I mean, it already runs on toasters.
NetBSD is far too heavy for the sorts of things mbed is designed for. It's intended for the Cortex-M series, which have an MPU but no MMU (i.e. they can do protection of a small set of memory regions but not translation). They typically have a few tens of KB of RAM. Things like ucLinux have shown that you can run a UNIX-like OS on this kind of platform, but they've also shown that it's a stupid idea (you can't for fork() cheaply or mmap() at all, so trying to pretend that you're UNIX is silly).
sudo mod me up