Hi,
Recently I have become much more interested in the possibility of running
ELKS on actual embedded systems, rather than a Linux for old PCs. I have
no plans for cutting down development of Linux-8086, but would like to add
options to the kernel config to make it possible to build a system which
can do something that is useful to people buidling single board embedded
80x86 systems.
Unfortunatly I have little grounding in this field, so I am not sure what
is required.
I would therefore like some pointers to texts that would give me an answer
to the following questions:
What sort of features are required for this type of system? It seems to me
that a filesystem is not all that important with no storage. Are device
drivers, interrupt handling and memory management the types of features
required?
What sort of real-time features to such operating systems generally have?
What type of API is the application code going to use? Is the UNIX system
API any use at all?
Are embedded applications run as stand-alone binaries, or do they get
linked into the kernel and run as kernel threads?
Can anyone tell me where I can get hold of a cheap SBC with an x86 CPU,
EPROM, RAM and a serial interface at least on?
Al