Migrating Legacy RTOS Device Drivers to Embedded Linux

With the accelerating pace of application development and ever more compressed product life cycles, the ability to reuse and migrate legacy software to new platforms is paramount. Migrating from legacy RTOS-based designs to embedded Linux presents a range of engineering challenges and also opportunities for refining I/O architecture and formalizing system interfaces.

This White Paper examines the particulars of legacy RTOS device interfaces and provides heuristics, resources and concrete examples of migrating this critical code to modern Linux-based embedded platforms. It also reviews the architecture and conventions of drivers built for VxWorks and other legacy RTOSes, and gives developers straightforward guidelines for mapping code and constructs onto Linux 2.6. It examines options for kernel and user space implementations, highlights licensing implications, and presents migration and debugging tools and techniques.