3 ms·

You could run XP in a virtual machine. Bonus is that it will portable when and if you upgrade the machine.

by hvidgaard 10y ago

swiley 10y ago
Older XP supposedly has a real time mode that got dropped in vista. If that's what they're using then a VM won't work.
- hvidgaard 10y ago
  Are you sure? I don't recall XP being real time of any kind, as it was designed ground up to be general purpose and specifically did not try to incorporate real time. I do remember some sort of extension that could install drivers that made it behave like a real time OS. However at that point I think seperating the control out to seperate hardware with a real time OS seems like the obvious choice, and then keeping the interface on a genereal purpose PC. Though it wouldn't be the first time a vendor made a stupid choice.
  - my123 10y ago
    The NT kernel has realtime scheduling priorities. It's not fully guaranteed though, and if a program with realtime priority hogs all the cores, you're screwed.
dom0 10y ago
Unlikely that this just works. T&M equipment was often not based on standard motherboards, even in the XP-firmware era. For example on some scopes there were parts on the mainboard that interfaces a proprietary interconnect to PCIe of the CPU/NB; the mainboard itself was kind-of-but-not-really µATX. Some more recent designs seem to be standard µATX with standard PCIe, though, so these should be possible to use with virtualisation and the mandatory IOMMU for the proprietary hardware (Feature locks / DRM might be cranky, tho). And before the mainstream OS era these were usually 100 % custom jobs, completely unlike a PC. 68k, MIPS, PPC, and even proprietary designs were used.
sigstoat 10y ago
it was reported to us by the support folks that the software wouldn't even work in windows 7's XP mode, which as i understand it, is VM-based. but, they said, "don't worry, we'll keep supporting XP!" ...right
- hvidgaard 10y ago
  They can support it all they want, but unless they want to produce hardware, it's very hard to replace a pc with one that can run XP at all.

You could run XP in a virtual machine. Bonus is that it will portable when and if you upgrade the machine.

swiley 10y ago

Older XP supposedly has a real time mode that got dropped in vista. If that's what they're using then a VM won't work.

hvidgaard 10y ago
Are you sure? I don't recall XP being real time of any kind, as it was designed ground up to be general purpose and specifically did not try to incorporate real time. I do remember some sort of extension that could install drivers that made it behave like a real time OS. However at that point I think seperating the control out to seperate hardware with a real time OS seems like the obvious choice, and then keeping the interface on a genereal purpose PC. Though it wouldn't be the first time a vendor made a stupid choice.
- my123 10y ago
  The NT kernel has realtime scheduling priorities. It's not fully guaranteed though, and if a program with realtime priority hogs all the cores, you're screwed.

dom0 10y ago

Unlikely that this just works. T&M equipment was often not based on standard motherboards, even in the XP-firmware era. For example on some scopes there were parts on the mainboard that interfaces a proprietary interconnect to PCIe of the CPU/NB; the mainboard itself was kind-of-but-not-really µATX. Some more recent designs seem to be standard µATX with standard PCIe, though, so these should be possible to use with virtualisation and the mandatory IOMMU for the proprietary hardware (Feature locks / DRM might be cranky, tho). And before the mainstream OS era these were usually 100 % custom jobs, completely unlike a PC. 68k, MIPS, PPC, and even proprietary designs were used.

sigstoat 10y ago

it was reported to us by the support folks that the software wouldn't even work in windows 7's XP mode, which as i understand it, is VM-based. but, they said, "don't worry, we'll keep supporting XP!" ...right

hvidgaard 10y ago
They can support it all they want, but unless they want to produce hardware, it's very hard to replace a pc with one that can run XP at all.