The Most Popular Operating System in the World
What do you believe is the most widely used operating system in the world? It's not Windows, Unix or Linux, but ITRON, a Japanese real-time kernel for small-scale embedded systems. ITRON runs on mobile phones, digital cameras, CD players and countless other electronic devices.
ITRON was a bold new Japanese project called The Real-time Operating system Nucleus, which emerged in 1984 and sought to replace many different computer systems with one integrated, open architecture for a "total computer environment.".
Its ultimate goal was to generate "highly functionally distributed systems" in which all system components connect to a real-time network. Professor Ken Sakamura, father of sorts to the TRON project, envisioned it as social infrastructure, like an electrical power grid or a water supply system.
Now, with more than 250 member companies, the T-Engine Forum, another fruit of the TRON project, has been working to establish an ITRON-based standardized development environment for applications running on embedded platforms. Vendors of proprietary solutions are getting worried-or at least they should be.
ITRON Is First
ITRON was the first in a series of open-source specifications for the TRON architecture and would answer a pressing need for Japan's electronics firms, which have traditionally written their own software for embedded systems, a time-consuming and cumbersome process that often results in a plethora of different and incompatible systems.
The ITRON specification is a standard real-time OS kernel that can be customized for any embedded system. ITRON already has been ported to a wide range of microprocessor architectures and has quickly become Japan's de facto standard for embedded systems. Today, the specification is used in an estimated 3 billion microprocessors.
Several other specifications came in following ITRON. Business TRON, or BTRON, was a multilingual environment for ubiquitous computing with a programmable GUI and Communications and Central TRON, or CTRON, was a real-time, multitasking operating system like Unix.
Japanese telecom giant NTT has taken up CTRON and made it the de facto standard in Japan's telecom industry.
Impact Postponed
The TRON Project is not new; in fact, it was poised to its mark over a decade ago, in Japan's PC industry, but the U.S. government intervened. In 1989, Japanese electronics giant Matsushita introduced a BTRON PC, a machine that stunned the industry with its advanced capabilities. The BTRON PC used an 80286 Intel chip operating at 8 MHz and carried only 2 MB of memory, but it could display moving video in color in a separate window. Furthermore, it had a dual-booting system in order to run the BTRON OS as well as MS-DOS.
When the Japanese government announced that it would install BTRON PC in Japanese schools, the U.S. government opposed it. It termed the Japanese move as "actual and potential market intervention" and threatened sanctions on the move. The Japanese, realizing that their export to the U.S. would be adversely affected, immediately abandoned the plan. The U.S. government later with drew the threat, but the damage had already been done. Almost all Japanese companies engaged in TRON-related activities canceled their projects.
However, ITRON did survive; today, it powers millions of Japanese gadgets, household appliances, automobile electronics, robots, and even satellites. In addition, ITRON is widely used in factory automation systems within China. Industry insiders claim that it is the number one OS for embedded chips in both Japan and the United States.
ITRON Survival
Earlier this year, Accelerated Technology, U.S.-based embedded systems division of Mentor Graphics, was appointed as the North American Liaison Office of the TRON Association. Can ITRON survive the growing popularity of Linux and its real-time version, RTLinux?
Steven Searle, who assisted in the development of TRON's multilingual environment, claims that ITRON has an advantage over its real-time variants of Linux. "TRON is an RTOS; Linux isn't," Searle told LinuxInsider, pointing out that ITRON is smaller and offers better real-time performance.
"RTLinux switches tasks in milliseconds while ITRON switches tasks in microseconds," he said. "RTLinux's footprint is measured in megabytes; ITRON is measured in kilobytes.".
The recent success, though, suggests that perhaps ITRON and Linux do have the potential for finding some middle ground. The T-Engine Forum, which aligned itself with Linux developer MontaVista earlier this year, is taking things further toward a standardization of embedded at the CPU level: TRON's real-time OS, security architecture, in particular its eTRON, middleware modules, and MontaVista Linux.
The MontaVista Partnership
MontaVista is actually helping develop a non-native kernel extension of TRON called T-Linux — an environment for running middleware. T-Engine and Linux will provide a base out of which to develop application software that will include the eTRON chip, an encryption device that makes secure data transfer across wireless networks and the Internet.
"T-Engine offers several advantages, among them new options for CPU architecture migration and more flexible commercial-licensing terms, in that T-Engine is not subject to the software patent," Bill Weinberg, director of strategy and evangelism at MontaVista, told LinuxInsider.
"At some point in the future," said Weinberg, "the T-Linux architecture is meant to support execution of both legacy ITRON code over T-Engine and native Linux code on the native Linux portion."
Linux Alliance
This combination of TRON and Linux will make it even harder for the companies producing proprietary embedded software. Proprietary software costs — vendors normally charge royalties for each microprocessor running the software — and licensing terms usually restrictive. Almost all of the consumer electronics Goliaths are crowding around open-source solutions.
Microsoft surprised the industry in late September by joining the T-Engine Forum. Microsoft seeks to cooperate with the Forum in formulating specifications for an environment in which both T-Kernel and Windows CE may share the T-Engine hardware reference platform.
Though the company will continue to develop its own OS, co-sponsored T-Engine developers are likely to be attracted by the Windows CE user interfaces. The prototypes from the collaboration will be on display at the Tokyo TronShow in December.
Ironically, Microsoft joins the T-Engine Forum. The company was the biggest winner of U.S. government actions against the TRON project in 1989. Tom Robertson, Microsoft's Tokyo-based director for government affairs in Asia, was formerly an official at the United States Trade Representative office that issued the threats against the Japanese government.
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