VDC Research recently released a report calling on Microsoft to revisit Windows Embedded. PPR discussed the report with co-author Roy Murdock, Analyst, IoT & Embedded Technology at VDC Research. Murdock also discussed other embedded operating systems, including FreeRTOS, an open-source RTOS whose development is now controlled by Amazon. The following interview has been edited for clarity.

PPR: You and your colleagues at VDC have predicted open source embedded operating systems rising from about 30 percent to nearly 39 percent in just three years, seemingly at the expense of the commercial OSes and the bare metal/lightweight segments. How much of that growth represents the FreeRTOS system versus other open source embedded operating systems?

Murdock: FreeRTOS is definitely going to be a major player. The main factor behind it is that we expect to see growth of FreeRTOS unit shipments in line with the growth in the overall MCU market. And the MCU market is already shipping hundreds of millions of units every year. If FreeRTOS even ships a fraction of those, that’s already huge number of unit shipments every year. So we expect FreeRTOS just keeping up with the unit shipment growth in the MCU market and we expect that growth to be around 8 percent through 2021. So that should give a better sense of unit growth we are expecting from FreeRTOS, as it is one of the most popular and MCU-focused RTOSes.

However, we’ll probably see safety-critical and real-time RTOSes somewhat sheltered from the FreeRTOS growth. That is, those commercial RTOSes that ship into cars and jet planes and industrial equipment. Many of these systems are not really good candidates for FreeRTOS to displace commercial RTOSes, so we are seeing some protected pockets of growth there. It’ll be more in the in-house, chip/vendor-supplied, and the bare metal category that we see FreeRTOS coming in to take some share. WITTENSTEIN High Integrity Systems (WHIS) provides a solution for safe and certified implementations of FreeRTOS, but in many cases we see FreeRTOS as a solution more for the consumer electronics market.

PPR: Besides FreeRTOS, what are the other RTOSes or open source operating systems in that segment?

Murdock: Embedded Linux is the other main force. It’s becoming really popular. But as I mentioned before, it will ship into fewer units due to the lower number of embedded MPU systems, or full-resource systems that can run an OS like Linux. There are just far more MCU-based systems. We expect to see a higher unit shipment growth in FreeRTOS on the MCU side, but embedded Linux is the other side of the coin. In many cases, if engineers are able to switch to free, open source embedded Linux, we’re finding that they’re totally willing to and making plans to switch.

PPR: FreeRTOS has hooks into the Amazon cloud ecosystem. Can Linux compete?

Murdock: These are two very separate markets. Embedded Linux would be shipping into something with a memory management unit (MMU), with a bunch of memory, and a bunch of resources. It probably doesn’t have hard real-time requirements. It could be something that would have run Microsoft Embedded, a system with a GUI such as an ATM or a retail kiosk – something like that would be a good candidate for embedded Linux.

FreeRTOS wouldn’t run as the primary OS in one of these systems. It doesn’t have the capabilities required for that. It would be more for MCU-based systems where you don’t have a lot of memory to work with, but you really only are carrying out only a few functions. Something like a sensor or an insulin pump. A lot of consumer electronics, such as a smart toothbrush, could also be good candidates for FreeRTOS.

PPR: In VDC’s latest report, what are the recommendations for Microsoft?

Murdock: They’ve done a good job at supporting some of their more fully featured operating systems in the embedded world with Windows 10 IoT Core and Enterprise. But they’ve discontinued the development of Windows Embedded Compact, and switched a lot of people out of that to work on Azure.

Firstly, we think they should take the opposite approach, and instead go back to Windows Embedded Compact and revitalize that. Secondly, we think they should move into the MCU space and offer an RTOS that could compete with FreeRTOS down at the very bottom level of the OS stack.

They never had an MCU-focused RTOS before. That would be a big change. And Windows has never been considered a small footprint RTOS. But we think that if they’re going to compete with Amazon at the AWS IoT/Azure IoT Suite level, they really need to look into providing something that could compete with FreeRTOS.

PPR: Last question: What about the vendors that make IoT devices or MCUs or the types of things that would use either a FreeRTOS or some sort of embedded operating system? How should they be positioning themselves in terms of the platforms that they align with?

Murdock: Many silicon vendors (Freescale, Intel, Renesas, SI Labs) have made OS acquisitions/partnerships in recent years. Many of the MCU vendors have also already decided to support FreeRTOS – there aren’t many alternatives for open RTOSs, and it made sense as FreeRTOS became more popular among their customers in the embedded engineer community.

That calculus in the ecosystem will change with this announcement – what the silicon vendors should or need to do to differentiate. They had looked at having more integrated stacks through OS acquisitions and development, but now you’ve got a much larger and more powerful entity, AWS, driving FreeRTOS forward and adding more software capabilities on top than would have happened organically.

In some cases, this may galvanize silicon vendors to get working on their competitive OS solutions, and to further invest in the software around their hardware offerings. In other cases, some vendors may fully embrace Amazon FreeRTOS if their customers continue to use and demand it. It’s still early and remains to be seen how the hardware ecosystem reacts.