I don't get it. Why would you use a real-time operating system on embedded devices? The devices they list aren't smart-phones but are appliances that only have a single purpose, thus you can code directly for that purpose and completely avoid the overhead of an operating system.
I think you underestimate the needs of products on the Japanese consumer electronics market.
Take the remote control for a karaoke machine. Do you have a mental image of what that looks like? Does your mental image look something like an American TV remote control? Good -- your mental image is accurate as of about 1989.
In 2009, a karaoke machine remote control has Wifi to download the song lyrics that it displays inline, a search engine available in four languages, integration with the mike and system so that it can grade you on your vocal performance without your coworkers seeing if you failed, top 100 charts updated monthly for the last year and yearly for the last decade or so, etc, etc.
Would you like to code directly for that purpose and completely avoid the overhead of an operating system? ;)
(In actual fact, most Japanese electronics are one-offs though. sigh I thank God every day that I took the job in Big Freaking Enterprise Web Apps instead of embedded devices.)
RTOSes can take a bunch of the pain out of managing concurrent tasks and interrupts, and if you bundle all that stuff into an RTOS, it can be reused across multiple projects. (Disclaimer: statement from book knowledge only.)
Interoperability? An RTOS on single purpose devices would ease the ability to create/run 3rd party apps for these devices, also allowing you to create apps for multiple single purpose devices.
GPS on cellphones that communicate seamlessly with your car, sending/receiving network data from a device ("Your toast is ready on your cell phone :)"), programming your DVR from your cell phone, etc.
I think you should have a look at the codebase of what goes on in your 'typical' embedded device.
A lousy navigation system, media player or cell phone is much more of a computer than your windows '98 box from a decade ago, both in terms of cpu capabilities, multitasking requirements and storage available. Think filesystems, databases, media playing, hot plug capability and so on.
The fact that most of the screens are small is no good reason to assume that what lies beyond that small screen is also somehow substandard.
Does anyone here have any experience with TRON? (I didn't realise it was open-sourced before) Every few years I read an article about it, and it's obviously not going away. I'm also vaguely curious if there has been much/any uptake outside of Japan.
TRON is rarely used outside of Japan because the specification documents are mostly in Japanese. TRON is more like an industry standard for an embedded RTOS than a concrete implementation. Of course, some open-source code is available, but these are reference implementations. More info:
Opportunity knocks! I had heard of this way back when but always assumed it had died when the US was lobbying the Japanese government to scale back MITI.
Does anyone else remember MSX? Looks like it never quite went away.
The Sony Playstation 2 SDK had functions that resembled the TRON OS (thread, event & message system). It even had the fixed thread priorities and such.
