[U-Boot-Users] RFC: Booting the Linux/ppc64 kernel without Open Firmware HOWTO

Dan Malek
2005-05-19T20:18:11Z

On May 19, 2005, at 3:37 PM, Linas Vepstas wrote:

> :-/ I was once very disatisfied with an earlier job I had because the
> boss kept trying to make me use a "rabbitcore" which had only 1MB for
> everything, and there was no way I'd be able to fit Linux into that.

People understand the trade off of the need for resources to get
the features they want, which is why they choose Linux in the
first place. Yes, sometimes people ask for what seems to be
unreasonable in such products, but it also forces us to be clever
about how we configure the systems.

The difficult trade off is when some states they get the same
feature set with one particular piece of software as they do with
Linux, but in much less space. The advantage of Linux is open
source and no royalties, but many of the RTOS systems these days
no longer have royalties, just a one time up front cost. When they
weigh that against the extra cost of memory for Linux and the number
of systems, the Linux "royalty" is more than the purchase of the
competing OS. It's really happening that way today.

Thanks.

-- Dan