7 ms·

This was "Azure RTOS", bought by Microsoft in haste after Amazon acquired FreeRTOS. Bill Lamie left to start PX5 and work on a new lightweight embedded RTOS an

This was "Azure RTOS", bought by Microsoft in haste after Amazon acquired FreeRTOS. Bill Lamie left to start PX5 and work on a new lightweight embedded RTOS and took most of the talent with him. If Microsoft is doing this, they're pretty much walking away from their roadmap for Azure RTOS and IoT nodes along those lines. I call it a win, ThreadX had a lot more ecosystem behind it than FreeRTOS ever did. And it does run on things other than Raspberry Pis. Renesas used to give it away for free if you bought their SoCs.

westurner 3y ago
But are there devs for the acquired platform now? The article says ThreadX used to be what Intel Management Engine ME ran on? How do I configure the ME / AMT VNC auth in there?
- joezydeco 3y ago
  ThreadX has been around for 25 years. You licensed it and put it in your embedded system. It's in a lot of products.
  - sigzero 3y ago
    > It's in a lot of products. "currently running on over 12 billion devices around the world"
  - westurner 3y ago
    But how many people agreed to sign an NDA in order to cluster fuzz such a critical low-level firmware binary blob component? Is this like another baseband processor?
    - joezydeco 3y ago
      The development of ThreadX has nothing to do with all with RPi and VideoCore. It's a software component that was used to develop a larger architecture.
    - numpad0 3y ago
      Is it like another Intel ME, phone modem firmware, etc? Absolutely! Everything from your x64 CPU to microSD to credit cards(not the readers; readers run antiquated Android and soon known-bad Chromium) runs some form of weird slow proprietary RTOS. It is what it is. I bet it takes ~century with help of superhuman AI to make those run an open and verified code. The situation is improving too, slowly, because using buggy proprietary code is not a goal, but means. It's ok to be disgusted about the status quo, but that is not necessarily worth your time; IIRC one of original complaints by RMS on the state of software freedom that lead to Free Software Movement was about some HP printer running buggy custom OS. Even the point people said enough is enough goes back that far.
      - parker_mountain 3y ago
        Gosh, there's so much wrong here. > weird slow proprietary They're often not weird, a simple single task runner with a few libraries to handle common tasks and cryptographic operations. Very simple, lightweight, and they generally share a common high level architecture (there's not much variation in an RTOS) They're often not slow, they're minimalist OSes - barely qualifying as an OS if at all - designed to run a single task, with time guarantees, and to get out of the way. In fact, if it's a single task you need to run, they're faster than any general purpose OS - by design! They're often not proprietary - a handful of RTOS with huge market penetration used in billions of devices (and now ThreadX) - are open source and have permissive licenses. What IS often proprietary about them are BSPs, but that's a whole separate issue. Yes, there are a lot of proprietary ones out there, but as a blanket statement, it's simply not true. > readers run antiquated Android Many use a stripped down version of AOSP, which has become a de facto standard BSP, yes. But many, many others do not (usually a flavor of embedded linux, or an RTOS). > about some HP printer running buggy custom OS It was a Xerox printer, and it was because he was frustrated from adding existing job management and notification features he had written to the new printer.
- SanjayMehta 3y ago
  The IME ran on Minix. https://itsfoss.com/fact-intel-minix-case/ https://itsfoss.com/fact-intel-minix-case/
  - westurner 3y ago
    Intel Management Engine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine
  - uxp8u61q 3y ago
    You've got that reversed. IME runs MINIX now, it used to run on ThreadX.
    - westurner 3y ago
      Linux (1991) started as a fork of MINIX (1987) by Tanenbaum. History of Linux: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux MINIX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minix Redox OS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redox_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redox_(operating_system) : > Redox is a Unix-like microkernel operating system written in the programming language Rust, which has a focus on safety, stability, and performance. [4][5][6] Redox aims to be secure, usable, and free.
      - aa-jv 3y ago
        Linux was NEVER a fork of MINIX. That is just false. Linus developed Linux in response to the experience he had with MINIX - but there is no MINIX code in Linux and never was.
        aleph_minus_one 3y ago
        > Linus developed Linux in response to the experience he had with MINIX - but there is no MINIX code in Linux and never was. For the last statement, Wikipedia disagrees: > https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Minix&oldid=1184672499#Relationship_with_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Minix&oldid=11846... "Eric Raymond claimed that Linus hasn't actually written Linux from scratch, but rather reused source code of MINIX itself to have working codebase. As the development progressed, MINIX code was gradually phased out completely." quoting "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" > https://monoskop.org/images/e/e0/Raymond_Eric_S_The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar_rev_ed.pdf https://monoskop.org/images/e/e0/Raymond_Eric_S_The_Cathedra... for this statement. On p. 24 you can read: "Linus Torvalds (http://www.tuxedo.org/˜esr/faqs/linus http://www.tuxedo.org/˜esr/faqs/linus), for example, didn’t actually try to write Linux from scratch. Instead, he started by reusing code and ideas from Minix, a tiny Unix-like operating system for PC clones. Eventually all the Minix code went away or was completely rewritten—but while it was there, it provided scaffolding for the infant that would eventually become Linux."
junon 3y ago
TIL Amazon acquired FreeRTOS.
- mort96 3y ago
  Yeah, I had no idea. That's ... worrying.
  - joezydeco 3y ago
    FreeRTOS isn't a threat.
    - egorfine 3y ago
      Amazon is.
      - joezydeco 3y ago
        If the planet was covered in Alexa devices and Dash buttons I'd say maybe. But even Amazon knows IoT node hardware is a sucker's game. Unless you have a highly vertical application that you can charge customers for, it's a market none of the FAANGs will touch.
        junon 3y ago
        Not sure your point. For me at least, it's about FreeRTOS's freedom and not being mangled by some megacorp since it's one of the few battle tested Firmware OSes out there.
cinntaile 3y ago
It's an acquisition from 2017 but do you happen to know why Amazon bought FreeRTOS?
- hashtag-til 3y ago
  I think it boils down to "because they can".
- kqr2 3y ago
  Amazon missed the boat on mobile phone operating systems. They tried to make their own phone but that was a massive failure. By buying FreeRTOS and building up the ecosystem, they were hoping to own the OS for IOTs.
- joezydeco 3y ago
  My belief is that Amazon sees IoT as a way to further grow AWS backend services. All those nodes need a cloud, somewhere. Taking stewardship of FreeRTOS allows them to develop a SDK, with or without a hardware kit included, to encourage IoT developers to lock into the Amazon ecosystem. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/freertos/latest/userguide/c-sdk.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/freertos/latest/userguide/c-sdk.... Microsoft saw this chain of events and panicked, buying up ThreadX to create Azure RTOS. I believe MS is now abandoning this path and focusing on other green fields...the recent events with OpenAI being a huge signal.
- wyldfire 3y ago
  Amazon is heavily marketing AWS ro automotive R&D teams. They want them to run their software on Graviton nodes for near-hw performance. And they have virtio-everything interfaces for you to use so your core functionality can be tested in AWS and you have some kind of hypervisor to partition and/or abstract the real HW interfaces. A "software defined vehicle" [1]. Those R&D teams spend a small fortune on devboards with each new generation and only use them for ~a couple years or so. So renting time on AWS is appealing because it's not depreciating capital and because they can be more flexible in how they adjust spending to suit development cycle phases where they need more/fewer concurrent units. Having freertos allows them to have credible experts in the space their customers are working in, and they can make design changes to freertos to suit this SDV concept. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/automotive/software-defined-vehicle/ https://aws.amazon.com/automotive/software-defined-vehicle/
pjmlp 3y ago
Yeah, it feels like getting rid of it. I never understood why they got it, when they already had Azure Sphere OS. At least they are open sourcing it, instead of leaving it in some digital vault.
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  > I never understood why they got it, when they already had Azure Sphere OS. Azure Sphere OS is based on Linux, thus needs much more powerful hardware than ThreadX.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    It is deeply customised version of the Linux kernel for IoT, with specific Sphere OS APIs, hardly a random Linux distribution. Having two OSes for the same space, even if ThreadX is less resource hungry makes marketing and developer support more complex.

westurner 3y ago

But are there devs for the acquired platform now? The article says ThreadX used to be what Intel Management Engine ME ran on? How do I configure the ME / AMT VNC auth in there?

joezydeco 3y ago
ThreadX has been around for 25 years. You licensed it and put it in your embedded system. It's in a lot of products.
- sigzero 3y ago
  > It's in a lot of products. "currently running on over 12 billion devices around the world"
- westurner 3y ago
  But how many people agreed to sign an NDA in order to cluster fuzz such a critical low-level firmware binary blob component? Is this like another baseband processor?
  - joezydeco 3y ago
    The development of ThreadX has nothing to do with all with RPi and VideoCore. It's a software component that was used to develop a larger architecture.
  - numpad0 3y ago
    Is it like another Intel ME, phone modem firmware, etc? Absolutely! Everything from your x64 CPU to microSD to credit cards(not the readers; readers run antiquated Android and soon known-bad Chromium) runs some form of weird slow proprietary RTOS. It is what it is. I bet it takes ~century with help of superhuman AI to make those run an open and verified code. The situation is improving too, slowly, because using buggy proprietary code is not a goal, but means. It's ok to be disgusted about the status quo, but that is not necessarily worth your time; IIRC one of original complaints by RMS on the state of software freedom that lead to Free Software Movement was about some HP printer running buggy custom OS. Even the point people said enough is enough goes back that far.
    - parker_mountain 3y ago
      Gosh, there's so much wrong here. > weird slow proprietary They're often not weird, a simple single task runner with a few libraries to handle common tasks and cryptographic operations. Very simple, lightweight, and they generally share a common high level architecture (there's not much variation in an RTOS) They're often not slow, they're minimalist OSes - barely qualifying as an OS if at all - designed to run a single task, with time guarantees, and to get out of the way. In fact, if it's a single task you need to run, they're faster than any general purpose OS - by design! They're often not proprietary - a handful of RTOS with huge market penetration used in billions of devices (and now ThreadX) - are open source and have permissive licenses. What IS often proprietary about them are BSPs, but that's a whole separate issue. Yes, there are a lot of proprietary ones out there, but as a blanket statement, it's simply not true. > readers run antiquated Android Many use a stripped down version of AOSP, which has become a de facto standard BSP, yes. But many, many others do not (usually a flavor of embedded linux, or an RTOS). > about some HP printer running buggy custom OS It was a Xerox printer, and it was because he was frustrated from adding existing job management and notification features he had written to the new printer.
SanjayMehta 3y ago
The IME ran on Minix. https://itsfoss.com/fact-intel-minix-case/ https://itsfoss.com/fact-intel-minix-case/
- westurner 3y ago
  Intel Management Engine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine
- uxp8u61q 3y ago
  You've got that reversed. IME runs MINIX now, it used to run on ThreadX.
  - westurner 3y ago
    Linux (1991) started as a fork of MINIX (1987) by Tanenbaum. History of Linux: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux MINIX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minix Redox OS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redox_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redox_(operating_system) : > Redox is a Unix-like microkernel operating system written in the programming language Rust, which has a focus on safety, stability, and performance. [4][5][6] Redox aims to be secure, usable, and free.
    - aa-jv 3y ago
      Linux was NEVER a fork of MINIX. That is just false. Linus developed Linux in response to the experience he had with MINIX - but there is no MINIX code in Linux and never was.
      - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
        > Linus developed Linux in response to the experience he had with MINIX - but there is no MINIX code in Linux and never was. For the last statement, Wikipedia disagrees: > https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Minix&oldid=1184672499#Relationship_with_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Minix&oldid=11846... "Eric Raymond claimed that Linus hasn't actually written Linux from scratch, but rather reused source code of MINIX itself to have working codebase. As the development progressed, MINIX code was gradually phased out completely." quoting "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" > https://monoskop.org/images/e/e0/Raymond_Eric_S_The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar_rev_ed.pdf https://monoskop.org/images/e/e0/Raymond_Eric_S_The_Cathedra... for this statement. On p. 24 you can read: "Linus Torvalds (http://www.tuxedo.org/˜esr/faqs/linus http://www.tuxedo.org/˜esr/faqs/linus), for example, didn’t actually try to write Linux from scratch. Instead, he started by reusing code and ideas from Minix, a tiny Unix-like operating system for PC clones. Eventually all the Minix code went away or was completely rewritten—but while it was there, it provided scaffolding for the infant that would eventually become Linux."

junon 3y ago

TIL Amazon acquired FreeRTOS.

mort96 3y ago
Yeah, I had no idea. That's ... worrying.
- joezydeco 3y ago
  FreeRTOS isn't a threat.
  - egorfine 3y ago
    Amazon is.
    - joezydeco 3y ago
      If the planet was covered in Alexa devices and Dash buttons I'd say maybe. But even Amazon knows IoT node hardware is a sucker's game. Unless you have a highly vertical application that you can charge customers for, it's a market none of the FAANGs will touch.
      - junon 3y ago
        Not sure your point. For me at least, it's about FreeRTOS's freedom and not being mangled by some megacorp since it's one of the few battle tested Firmware OSes out there.

cinntaile 3y ago

It's an acquisition from 2017 but do you happen to know why Amazon bought FreeRTOS?

hashtag-til 3y ago
I think it boils down to "because they can".
kqr2 3y ago
Amazon missed the boat on mobile phone operating systems. They tried to make their own phone but that was a massive failure. By buying FreeRTOS and building up the ecosystem, they were hoping to own the OS for IOTs.
joezydeco 3y ago
My belief is that Amazon sees IoT as a way to further grow AWS backend services. All those nodes need a cloud, somewhere. Taking stewardship of FreeRTOS allows them to develop a SDK, with or without a hardware kit included, to encourage IoT developers to lock into the Amazon ecosystem. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/freertos/latest/userguide/c-sdk.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/freertos/latest/userguide/c-sdk.... Microsoft saw this chain of events and panicked, buying up ThreadX to create Azure RTOS. I believe MS is now abandoning this path and focusing on other green fields...the recent events with OpenAI being a huge signal.
wyldfire 3y ago
Amazon is heavily marketing AWS ro automotive R&D teams. They want them to run their software on Graviton nodes for near-hw performance. And they have virtio-everything interfaces for you to use so your core functionality can be tested in AWS and you have some kind of hypervisor to partition and/or abstract the real HW interfaces. A "software defined vehicle" [1]. Those R&D teams spend a small fortune on devboards with each new generation and only use them for ~a couple years or so. So renting time on AWS is appealing because it's not depreciating capital and because they can be more flexible in how they adjust spending to suit development cycle phases where they need more/fewer concurrent units. Having freertos allows them to have credible experts in the space their customers are working in, and they can make design changes to freertos to suit this SDV concept. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/automotive/software-defined-vehicle/ https://aws.amazon.com/automotive/software-defined-vehicle/

pjmlp 3y ago

Yeah, it feels like getting rid of it. I never understood why they got it, when they already had Azure Sphere OS. At least they are open sourcing it, instead of leaving it in some digital vault.

aleph_minus_one 3y ago
> I never understood why they got it, when they already had Azure Sphere OS. Azure Sphere OS is based on Linux, thus needs much more powerful hardware than ThreadX.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  It is deeply customised version of the Linux kernel for IoT, with specific Sphere OS APIs, hardly a random Linux distribution. Having two OSes for the same space, even if ThreadX is less resource hungry makes marketing and developer support more complex.