The ELC board, which met here at the Embedded Systems Conference this week, said the need for a standard has become obvious. "One of the concerns we hear is,'Is embedded Linux going to fragment and go the way of Unix?' " said Inder Singh, chairman and chief executive officer of LynuxWorks Inc. (San Jose, Calif.). "Right now, each vendor approaches the Linux operating system in a slightly different way."

At ELC's meeting on Monday (April 9), Singh and seven other board members unveiled a plan to endorse a unified specification. Called the ELC Platform Specification, it would cover basic operating system services and would provide a platform for embedded middleware and application software. The proposed specification would be based on other existing specifications, such as the Posix 1003.13, the Single Unix Specification, and the Linux Standard Base. Board members said the use of existing models would enable them to produce a written specification more quickly.

"By using ingredients that are already on the shelf, we can shortcut the standards process," said Murry Shohat, executive director of the ELC (Santa Rosa, Calif.).

The group said that a primary purpose of the ELC Platform Specification would be to serve as a target to develop an ELC-sponsored test suite and certification program for verifying compliance of products. Board members also plan to create a trademark logo and sticker that would be stamped on embedded Linux products, in much the same fashion as Intel's popular "Intel Inside" logo.

"A standard platform is critical for applications like PDAs, wireless data phones, and telematics," Singh said. "If we succeed, the promise is very exciting. Having a standard has always been the Holy Grail for Linux."

Singh said that the ELC board hopes to release a specification within a few months. Of the approximately 70 attendees at the meeting, the vast majority were in favor of proceeding with the effort.

Because the specification is currently just a proposal, not much was known about its details. During a session following the ELC presentation, however, one board member did address questions about the size of a standard embedded operating system. "We're going to need to leave out some of the things you'd see in a desktop operating system," said Tim Bird, chief technology officer and cofounder of Lineo Inc. (Salt Lake City). "We're probably talking about something that will run below 4 megabytes."

Middleware providers heartily supported the proposal. "From our perspective, its very difficult to target a plethora of applications," said Dan Bandera, ELC vice chairman and device software product manager for IBM Corp. "The approach ELC is taking makes a lot of sense."

Board member companies represented at the meeting included IBM, LynuxWorks, Lineo, MontaVista Software and Red Hat.

Dissenters at the meeting expressed concern that the ELC standard wouldn't benefit the broader Linux community as a whole. "This proposal . . . seems to smack of an attempt to produce an embedded Linux cartel," said Kevin Dankwardt, president of K Computing (Mountain View, Calif.). "An attempt to define a standard merely on an API will be fairly useless except for marketing value to a few select vendors."

Board members said that they welcomed dissenting opinions from users and member companies, both of whom were present at the meeting. "We're still in a phase right now where we want to roll this out and see if we want to continue ahead," said Bird of Lineo.