It's not the size that counts...

I had an e-mail asking why someone would move from their existing 100kb operating system to Windows CE when the CE 6.0 kernel alone builds at about 300kb and the CE 6.0 image that meets the needs of the customer is about 1MB in size.

In many cases size isn't a good metric for comparison, perhaps features and functionality may be a better comparison, of course limiting size of an embedded operating system can be important depending on the type of embedded application you are building.

Assuming that the current embedded operating system lives in the 100kb size range I wonder what capabilities it has in terms of communication support - is there any support for personal area networking (bluetooth, IrDA), local area networking (Wired/Wireless lan, IPv4, IPv6, what about secure sockets), what about wide area networking (server technologies, FTP, RAS, HTTP, and client side technologies, RDP, VPN, PPTP) - and what about higher level functionality such as media player and codecs, internet browser, what about VoIP capabilities, networked media streaming, and the list goes on. Exactly what do you get for your 100kb? - Windows CE and Windows XP Embedded are componentized operating systems, so the more features you add from the catalog of components the larger the operating system size is going to be.

Microsoft offers a range of embedded operating systems which includes .NET Micro Framework, Windows CE, Windows XP Embedded, and Windows Embedded for Point of Service - you get to pick the operating system that fits the feature set, size, real-time, and processor needs for your device.

- Mike

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 03, 2007
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• Anonymous
  March 03, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 11, 2007
  Oops. Sorry, Mike, looks like I indeed misread your post - I somehow assumed the guy was moving from WinCE 5.0. Must have been tired, or something... ;) But I'm afraid that doesn't take away from the point I was trying to make in my post, which is that way too often (more often than not?) it IS the size that counts. Claiming support for everything + kitchen sink in one's [whatever OS]-based device is  cute, but it's a game of "he who dies with the most dollar bills stuffed under the mattress wins", and fat BOMs lead to skinny margins. I think you know that just as well as I do... I'm not saying that there's no market for Maybachs, I'm just saying that the billions are made elsewhere. Sheers.

• Anonymous
  March 11, 2007
  The comment has been removed