7 ms·

Wind River VxWorks Platforms 6.9 RTOS [pdf]

29 points by Alupis 8y ago

nairboon 8y ago
Any comments on this submission? 6.9 is somewhat old by now,and the dev tooling around it "works" but is quite buggy sometimes...
- pseudosudoer 8y ago
  My "favorite" bug on 6.9 is that if number of symbols in your binaries exceeds some magic limit, workbench will fail 100% of the time to connect to the remote debug server... We exclusively use logs to debug on VxWorks.
  - planteen 8y ago
    It's been a while since I used VxWorks, but I hated Workbench as well (prefer using a plain old makefile). One of my favorite features of VxWorks was the shell you could get on a serial port. It was quite powerful, even letting you do REPL with C functions which was pretty awesome for debugging. Another "favorite" feature of VxWorks was how they disabled floating point by default in tasks (at least on the LEON and PPC). Always led to confusion and frustration by someone new to the platform.
  - nairboon 8y ago
    Interesting bug, I presume that happend even after bumping WDB_GOPHER_TAPE_LEN. I had a similar bug, where if the object file was "too large" (if you needed debug symbols...) the IDE loader would crash and you couldn't debug.
metaphor 8y ago
Last time I checked, ~US$30k per development license...just in case anyone was wondering.
- fpoling 8y ago
  I suppose the idea of selling only to those who can pay is in Wind River DNA. I worked for a company that WR bought in 2000. We had a product where it was possible for a small shop to get a license for 1000 USD or so. Wind River canceled that and the cheapest license became at least 15K. The claim was that the money came from big customers and it was “wasteful” to deal with smaller guys. Yet it was the small guys that provided effective advertisement for the product to bring attention of bigger customers.
  - pstuart 8y ago
    I worked for a company that WR bought around that time. WR management seemed to be into "retail therapy" -- buying stuff for the sake of the purchase with no concern or intent on how to integrate it in.
scandox 8y ago
Can someone explain to me why anyone needs this? I once had to try to use it with some weird Intel SOC but I gave up. So...Real question.
- seren 8y ago
  One of the reason to buy VxWorks is that it comes with certification for various industries : https://www.windriver.com/products/vxworks/certification-profiles/ https://www.windriver.com/products/vxworks/certification-pro... So if you have to explain to the regulatory body that you have a certified OS with all the appropriate paperwork, it always easier than certifying your custom OS. The second point from an enterprise point of view is that in case of weird issue you can rely on Windriver support. Not so easy when you have built your own Yocto distribution, with recipe from dubious origin. So in the end, you pay to mitigate risks. My company investigated switching from VxWorks to Xenomai (wich helpfully provide a wrapper to access the kernel with a VxWorks compatible API). In the end, once you added the support and certification, it was not less expensive.
- planteen 8y ago
  You are developing a medial, automotive, or aerospace application that needs hard real-time response rates and certification. There is also the option of paying a company to develop a BSP for your custom hardware rather than having to do it in-house. Another product in the same class is INTEGRITY from Green Hill Software.
- moftz 8y ago
  Are you asking why anyone needs an RTOS? It provides a very robust solution that sits somewhere between running a plain old OS like Linux and running baremetal C on a microprocesser. You get the speed benefit of baremetal but also get a scheduler and a whole bunch of multiprocessing structure to run lots of applications at once without worrying about manually switching or trying to create a massive main.c to do everything. VxWorks specifically runs on lots of industrial computers such that tasks can get done in a timely manner with little overhead. VxWorks powers the Mars Rovers Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and SpaceX Dragon. VxWorks also powers BMW iDrive, the Apache Longbow helicopter, and the Apple Airport Extreme and Linksys WRT54G routers. It's in a lot of things and what it's not in, FreeRTOS is probably the RTOS of choice.
brianolson 8y ago
ok, VxWorks exists. Is there something new and interesting?

29 points by Alupis 8y ago

Any comments on this submission? 6.9 is somewhat old by now,and the dev tooling around it "works" but is quite buggy sometimes...

pseudosudoer 8y ago
My "favorite" bug on 6.9 is that if number of symbols in your binaries exceeds some magic limit, workbench will fail 100% of the time to connect to the remote debug server... We exclusively use logs to debug on VxWorks.
- planteen 8y ago
  It's been a while since I used VxWorks, but I hated Workbench as well (prefer using a plain old makefile). One of my favorite features of VxWorks was the shell you could get on a serial port. It was quite powerful, even letting you do REPL with C functions which was pretty awesome for debugging. Another "favorite" feature of VxWorks was how they disabled floating point by default in tasks (at least on the LEON and PPC). Always led to confusion and frustration by someone new to the platform.
- nairboon 8y ago
  Interesting bug, I presume that happend even after bumping WDB_GOPHER_TAPE_LEN. I had a similar bug, where if the object file was "too large" (if you needed debug symbols...) the IDE loader would crash and you couldn't debug.

metaphor 8y ago

Last time I checked, ~US$30k per development license...just in case anyone was wondering.

fpoling 8y ago
I suppose the idea of selling only to those who can pay is in Wind River DNA. I worked for a company that WR bought in 2000. We had a product where it was possible for a small shop to get a license for 1000 USD or so. Wind River canceled that and the cheapest license became at least 15K. The claim was that the money came from big customers and it was “wasteful” to deal with smaller guys. Yet it was the small guys that provided effective advertisement for the product to bring attention of bigger customers.
- pstuart 8y ago
  I worked for a company that WR bought around that time. WR management seemed to be into "retail therapy" -- buying stuff for the sake of the purchase with no concern or intent on how to integrate it in.

scandox 8y ago

Can someone explain to me why anyone needs this? I once had to try to use it with some weird Intel SOC but I gave up. So...Real question.

seren 8y ago
One of the reason to buy VxWorks is that it comes with certification for various industries : https://www.windriver.com/products/vxworks/certification-profiles/ https://www.windriver.com/products/vxworks/certification-pro... So if you have to explain to the regulatory body that you have a certified OS with all the appropriate paperwork, it always easier than certifying your custom OS. The second point from an enterprise point of view is that in case of weird issue you can rely on Windriver support. Not so easy when you have built your own Yocto distribution, with recipe from dubious origin. So in the end, you pay to mitigate risks. My company investigated switching from VxWorks to Xenomai (wich helpfully provide a wrapper to access the kernel with a VxWorks compatible API). In the end, once you added the support and certification, it was not less expensive.
planteen 8y ago
You are developing a medial, automotive, or aerospace application that needs hard real-time response rates and certification. There is also the option of paying a company to develop a BSP for your custom hardware rather than having to do it in-house. Another product in the same class is INTEGRITY from Green Hill Software.
moftz 8y ago
Are you asking why anyone needs an RTOS? It provides a very robust solution that sits somewhere between running a plain old OS like Linux and running baremetal C on a microprocesser. You get the speed benefit of baremetal but also get a scheduler and a whole bunch of multiprocessing structure to run lots of applications at once without worrying about manually switching or trying to create a massive main.c to do everything. VxWorks specifically runs on lots of industrial computers such that tasks can get done in a timely manner with little overhead. VxWorks powers the Mars Rovers Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and SpaceX Dragon. VxWorks also powers BMW iDrive, the Apache Longbow helicopter, and the Apple Airport Extreme and Linksys WRT54G routers. It's in a lot of things and what it's not in, FreeRTOS is probably the RTOS of choice.

brianolson 8y ago

ok, VxWorks exists. Is there something new and interesting?