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Plenty of industrial systems have been working fine, unchanged, for decades. An example off the top of my head -- a CNC mill at my previous job, purchased new
by ISL 6y ago
Plenty of industrial systems have been working fine, unchanged, for decades.
An example off the top of my head -- a CNC mill at my previous job, purchased new perhaps ten years ago, runs DOS 6.22 with Windows CE on top. I suspect that the vendor is still selling the same software stack on the same hardware today.
Before someone chimes in to say, "That's insane, why isn't it running an RTOS?": That mill had zero software faults in the years I worked with it.
Edit: Poking around Trak's website, it looks like the software on today's machines is unchanged. Here are some example screenshots: https://www.southwesternindustries.com/software/page/prototrak-tmx-cnc-software-m11 https://www.southwesternindustries.com/software/page/prototr...
- stefan_ 6y agoAnd they will continue to run. No one in their right mind will ever upgrade the software on them. That is a lot of the reason behind removing old platforms from Linux: whatever the systems out there are running, it's not a HEAD kernel release.
- cbmuser 6y agoHEAD kernel runs fine on my Amiga 4000 from 1992. It also runs fine on my SH-7785LCR SuperH board where I regularly test the latest kernel releases and patches.
- simias 6y agoEven if that were true (and it's not completely true by the way) autotools is not used to build the kernel. You can very much use autotools to build modern software for older kernels. That's... kind of the point of using something like autotools. Frankly reading this thread I think many people here bark at the wrong tree. If you don't care for portability don't bother with autotools, just write Makefiles. It's much simpler.
- detaro 6y agoPlenty manufacturers ship software updates to 32 bit devices. Plenty 32bit devices are being sold or even newly released right now.
- kstrauser 6y agoDo those systems need new software to support them in 2021? If they used autotools, say, they could snapshot the last working version that worked with their system and not care what the new version does. It's not like there are a lot of fixes being merged in these days to handle 30 year old systems.
- skissane 6y ago> An example off the top of my head -- a CNC mill at my previous job, purchased new perhaps ten years ago, runs DOS 6.22 with Windows CE on top I thought Windows CE was a standalone operating system like current Windows versions are, not a layer on top of DOS like Windows 3.x and earlier were. But, Googling, I see Windows CE, on x86, did use DOS as a bootloader, just like how Windows 9x did. DOS boots, then runs LOADCEPC.EXE to start Windows CE. (By contrast, CE on other CPU architectures didn't do this, it just booted Windows CE directly.)
- bdowling 6y ago> Before someone chimes in to say, "That's insane, why isn't it running an RTOS?" I'm chiming in to say that Windows CE is an RTOS. [0] [0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/embedded/ee483050(v=winembedded.60) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/e...
- ISL 6y agoWhoa. I sit corrected!
- maccard 6y agoHow often does someone compile and run new software on those machines? And also, let's be honest, autotools and windows have never worked well together.