10 ms·
VxWorks has a reputation, for which I have no great feel for whether or not it's deserved. But to their credit, it's running on Mars, on (at least) Pathfinder,
by bigiain 3y ago
VxWorks has a reputation, for which I have no great feel for whether or not it's deserved.
But to their credit, it's running on Mars, on (at least) Pathfinder, Spirit, Curiosity, and Opportunity.
Meeting, and in most cases seriously exceeding planned mission lifetimes, earns VxWorks some serious kudos from me.
- lloeki 3y agoI remember doing some coding on VxWorks during my engineering school. From my then limited experience it was an oddball but also as my first exposure to hard real time programming it sure was approachable and reliable as fuck. Definitely not surprised it was picked for space stuff. Comparatively, toying with RT Linux was obscure and full of duct-tape and footguns. I wish I had a chance to try and code on QNX beyond merely booting that magical 3.5" floppy.
- bigiain 3y agoOh man! That QNX floppy was _so_ awesome. (I wonder how it'd stack up today? Surely an ESP32 has more compute grunt than anything that QNX demos ran on back in the '90s, I wonder if anybody has ported it?)
- fatnoah 3y agoMy very first full-time (non-internship) professional job in the late 90's was to adapt a COTS ATM protocol stack to run on VxWorks as part of a military project featuring a satellite equipped HMMWV to provide connectivity. Part of that job was a three week trip to Alameda, CA for training and certification on VxWorks. In general, the software worked as expected, and did what a RTOS is supposed to do in terms of being predictable and deterministic.
- xcrunner529 3y agoAnd runs tons of rollercoasters and amusement rides on AB PLCs.