“Back in the “old days,” just getting to a boot prompt on a new
piece of hardware was a difficult and a necessary step in
developing an embedded device. Now, thanks to the advent of Linux,
many reference boards come with some sort of basic functioning
operating system. However, the work is hardly done for those who
are trying to develop and deploy an embedded device. Creating a
complete, robust, reliable and maintainable Linux operating system
that is suitable for deployment in embedded operating systems is no
small task. Most end users of embedded devices don’t particularly
care if a group of individuals spent considerable effort to create
an operating system. The end users simply expect the devices to
work, and expect there to be value far beyond a basic operating
system running on hardware.“Yet, at this very moment, there are thousands of engineers
repeating the same non-differentiating work. They are downloading
software, creating build systems, gathering up user packages, and
creating a custom distribution that they will hand off to an
application development team who will add the applications to the
system and integrate it all together.”