Comment by ChuckMcM
2 days ago
That's awesome. Back in the day this was the strong point of eCOS which was a bare metal "platform" for running essentially one application on x86 hardware. The x86 ecosystem has gotten so complicated that being able to do this can get you better performance for an "embedded" app than running on top of Linux or another embedded OS. That translates into your appliance type device using lower cost chips which is a win. When I was playing around with eCos a lot of the digital signage market was using it.
Does anyone still do it that way?
With AMD64 style chips? Probably not. Multi-core systems really need a scheduler to get the most out of them so perhaps there are some very specific applications where that would be a win but I cannot think of anything that isn't super specific. For ARM64 chips with a small number of cores, sure that is still a very viable too for appliance type (application specific) applications.