[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for
this link. ]
“Currently, embedded systems design often requires
building specialized versions of OSes for specific devices – unlike
PC or Mid-range computer systems, you can’t just pre-load a
generic Windows, Linux or Mac OS, you have to specially tailor the
environment to your target device, which could run on a multitude
of different embedded chip architectures and use a wide variety of
device drivers for system components, such as flash memory chips,
network interfaces, display types, et cetera – not to mention run a
myriad of different embedded OSes that have to be customized to the
device, such as iPhone OS, BlackBerry OS, embedded Linux, Windows
CE, vxWorks and Symbian. Just to name a few.”