SunSoft Inc will soon reveal details of its plan to enter the real-time Unix market, reports today’s issue of our sister paper Unigram.X, with binary versions of Embedded Solaris expected to run on Sparc as well as PowerPC and Intel too. Interest from the PowerPC fraternity, notably traditional embedded enthusiast Motorola Inc, will be used to divert some attention from the failed effort to establish Solaris as a general-purpose PowerPC operating system in conjunction with IBM Corp. SunSoft sees embedded Solaris running in switches, manufacturing systems and the like, while JavaOS, Sun’s other skinny operating system, will run in Internet phones and other devices. Solaris 2 is suited to real-time applications, being far more deterministic than most past versions of Unix, SunSoft says. With faster RISCs, interrupt latencies are getting shorter and shorter, the company claims. It says there are already instances of Solaris being used in embedded applications such as process control; customers have chopped down the source code for their own requirements. It says Embedded Solaris won’t kill off the market for VxWorks, LynxOS and other embedded Unixes, but thinks it will push them further down into the market for customers with ‘hard’ real-time requirements. The initial version of Embedded Solaris will have a tool kit enabling developers to trade Solaris features such as the graphical user interface, for RAM and disk (and dollar) savings. There may also be ROM-able and Flash memory versions in future for markets where no moving parts such as disks are desired.
