Most of my active research (and development) is done for Barco Control Rooms on the efficient implementation of streaming video solutions in an embedded environment. This is done by the design of reliable dedicated solutions.
Even though the boards themselves are placed into a complex networked grid and are governed as such by the control-ware; at an embedded level, we address each board as an networked entity. Since the boards are running tiny GNU/Linux systems, they are equipped with that functionality as the need arises. Over time, we have replaced the telnet shell access with ssh (secure shell); including all the extra advantages this offers for Windows users (everything needs to be drag and drop :( ). Although some may be startled by the "root" login, these are older pictures :-/ root login has been disabled :); much to the dispair of support.
The boards have different implementations, functionality and target audiences, but due to the large flexibility we obtain from running a GNU/Linux system; the boards can be addressed in a heterogeneous environment.
The Admistration of the boards allows fault tolerant upgrade that ensures that the boards will always return to a stable state; even in the presence of transient network errors.
More information on the relevant work can be found in the papers section of my page (FOSDEM2005), or on the online version.
More recent information can be found on the Nios II section. The bulk of the information is about the creation of a toolchain with buildroot (and dependent on uclibc and busybox).
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