Beckhoff Gets Smaller RAM Footprint by Switching from Windows to FreeBSD

Quote:

Heiko Wilke, Senior Product Manager at Beckhoff, notes that with Windows, Beckhoff used 1.5 gigabytes of memory in their devices for Windows installation alone. By comparison, Beckhoff’s smallest device has only 2 gigabytes of RAM.

Because FreeBSD doesn’t include processes that aren’t needed, Beckhoff can reduce its use to about 200 megabytes of RAM usage, according to Heiko Wilke, leaving much more room for additional programs on top of their operating system.

So that is 0.2 GB for FreeBSD while 1.5 GB for Windows.

This bit about GPL vs. BSD is interesting:

  The GNU General Public License that would create additional legal complications for Beckhoff’s customers as well as force Beckhoff to share their proprietary real-time, TwinCAT, which runs in kernel-mode.

Would they need to share the TwinCAT source code if they were to use Linux? Nvidia gets around this requirement with dynamically loaded binary blobs.

Or to pose a different but related question, do all eBPF programs need to be open-sourced rather than distributed as bytecode only because they run in kernel mode?

They are surging from Windows_CE_ to FreeBSD, the headline unfortunately omits the “CE”.