FreeBSD vs. Linux for embedded

You might also want to look at NetBSD for embedded, they support many architectures, including arm, mips, ppc ...

system

I suppose it sort of depends on what you plan to do with your ARM9.

The first thing that always springs to my mind when FreeBSD is mentioned is storage; ZFS is a great filesystem for a NAS, and LInux currently has no equivalent (I wouldn't consider btrfs ready as of yet).

FreeBSD's networking stack has been renowned as solid for a long time, and has evolved gradually over the last decade or so. That wasn't necessarily the case in Linux's past, but the difference these days is far less than it used to be.

You might also wish to consider the licences involved. With Linux, you're bound by the GPL to make your kernel source available to anyone that asks for it. There's no such requirement imposed by the simplified BSD licence invoked by BSD - there's a boilerplate copyright notice that must accompany both any source you wish to release and your binaries, but there's no requirement to release any source. That may or may not be an issue for you.

Frankly, I don't think you could go far wrong with either, and the decision might simply be down to which system you're more comfortable working with.

One other thing: depending on what you need to accomplish, both might be more heavyweight than is necessary. For an entirely new project, it's always worth considering whether you could get enough out of the likes of FreeRTOS (or similar) before jumping to a much larger general-purpose OS.

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