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ARM Announces a New Low-Power OS: mbed

posted by martyb on Tuesday October 07 2014, @04:15PM   Printer-friendly
from the next-up-are-mcot-msofa-and-mrecliner dept.

tonyPick writes:

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.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday October 07 2014, @07:56PM

    by kaszz (4211) on Tuesday October 07 2014, @07:56PM (#103282) Journal

    "NetBSD was made for this."

    It is, provided the MCU has MMU. And it's a pain many times to find one with MMU.

    BSD on MCU without MMU requirement would be neat. And it has to be very slimmed too. No 10 MB RAM for a running kernel..

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  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday October 08 2014, @08:54AM

    by TheRaven (270) on Wednesday October 08 2014, @08:54AM (#103499) Journal
    Not really. Without an MMU, you have a small number of regions of memory that you can protect from each other (so you can do something like process isolation), but you don't have a way of doing shared mappings. If you want to implement fork(), then you need to copy the entire process into a new segment (crazy to do right before an exec - fork dates from a time when computers only had one process in online storage and so you got the copy for free after writing the current copy out to offline storage). You can't do mmap() - you can't do shared memory, you can't have holes in your address space. Trying to run something with POSIX-like APIs on an ARM core without an MMU involves jumping through a lot of hoops. You'd be better off using something with abstractions that map well to the hardware. RISC OS would actually be quite nice for a lot of this kind of thing...
    --
    sudo mod me up

    • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday October 08 2014, @01:24PM

      by kaszz (4211) on Wednesday October 08 2014, @01:24PM (#103559) Journal

      What it comes down to is to be able to port software from "real" Unix to your embedded environment with the least amount of core changes. Dynamic relocation of executables solves a lot of the problems a lack of MMU causes.