12 ms·
One must have balls of steel to run windows on a spaceship.
by sharpshadow 2y ago
One must have balls of steel to run windows on a spaceship.
- perching_aix 2y agoPersonally, I wouldn't be stoked to run Linux on them either to be honest. But both are being done. Practicality rules I suppose.
- anonzzzies 2y agoHaving sourcecode to everything would make me trust things more as at least we could fix things without calling MS. But what would you run? QNX? BSD?
- withinboredom 2y agoJust because you have the source code, doesn't mean you have the knowledge to fix it before you die.
- anonzzzies 2y agoSure, but without it, you stand no chance at all.
- exe34 2y agowindows is source-available if you have deep enough pockets: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/enterprise-source-licensing-program.aspx https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/enterprise-sour...
- anonzzzies 2y agoAnyway, I was responding to someone who wouldn't run either on a spaceship so I still would like to know what they would want to run. I am from a formal verification school of thought, so I would want something sel4.
- exe34 2y agoI'd want manual backup pushbuttons.
- foobar1962 2y agoAnd another box close enough so the CD tray can press them when it opens.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y agoDoes Microsoft also provide you the tools to build it? I assume there are many Microsoft internal tools, libraries, etc required to compile anything of note. Presumably it has been dog fooded for so long it would be impossible to bootstrap without some number of binary artifacts in hand.
- withinboredom 2y agoI feel like this misses the point so much that it might as well be nonsense. A better way to put my argument is: could an average mom build Linux on specialized hardware in space? If the answer is "yes", then you may have a point. I don't think the answer is yes.
- johnisgood 2y agoNo, but you can review the source code before (or at any point), whereas with Windows, you cannot even do that.
- withinboredom 2y agoI've occasionally worked on drivers for windows and linux. In either case, I didn't really need to read the source code; neither was it a valuable proposition. If the advertised API didn't do what it was supposed to, I likely wouldn't have understood enough to fix it: and this is my point. Just because you can read it, doesn't mean you can or will be able to actually fix it; not because of technicality, but because of personal knowledge. In this case, they are both black boxes.
- johnisgood 2y agoI mean, I agree, I am just saying that it is better (in general) to have the source than not having it.
- withinboredom 2y agoHow so? I once spent three days trying to figure out an issue, stepping line by line through hadoop (after figuring out the issue was in hadoop and not my own code). Yay, I proved the issue was actually in Java itself. Guess what happened next? We avoided the bug. Why? - We couldn't update Java. - We couldn't change hadoop because we were using a packaged solution. So, we just filed a bug with them. Had the source not been available, we would have just skipped all of that, and it would have been our vendor's problem 3 days earlier.
- icehawk 2y agoFor something like the spacecraft in the article, you absolutely would have the ability to get access to the Windows source code.
- exe34 2y agowindows is source-available if you have deep enough pockets: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/enterprise-source-licensing-program.aspx https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/enterprise-sour...
- GlenTheMachine 2y agoVxWorks, usually
- redleader55 2y agoIf you ever count how many patches are in between stable point releases - eg. 6.10.5 to 6.10.6, you'll see having the source code is not enough. All of these patches are fixes for something or another, not features, but fixes. If you look at an LTS branch, you'll see there are hundreds of point releases. Usually a point release is created once every 5-10 days. I interpret that to mean bugs were not found until many weeks after the LTS branch was cut. Obviously, not all of them affect you, but many patches apply important subsystems which affect you.
- ssrc 2y agoVxWorks, LynxOS or RTEMS. RTEMS is open source.
- inamberclad 2y ago+1 for RTEMS! Great fully featured RTOS
- perching_aix 2y agoMaybe sel4? I'm not in embedded so maybe I'm being pretty silly here, but I think being formally proven and realtime are pretty good things to have in the case of an expensive, long lived space project. That said, this is on the scale that I'm surprised off-the-shelf things are even being considered. I'd have thought they'd just roll something bespoke and that's the end of that.
- rurban 2y agoBaremetal of course. If it gets complicated (ie threads): QNX, vxworks, L4.
- wubrr 2y agoWhat's the practical benefit of using Windows here?
- wil421 2y agoThe new galactic empire has an enterprise licensing agreement with Microsoft.
- jandrese 2y agoEasier to find developers who are comfortable with Windows.
- wubrr 2y agoProbably not the case in spacecraft engineering. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41650534#41651310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41650534#41651310
- gosub100 2y agoMaybe technically you could save $89 and run pirated windows because of (possibly?) no jurisdiction in space?
- jmclnx 2y agoReally, with Linux (or a BSD), you can make tweaks for free to save memory and to only allow specific tasks and hardware. Plus you could publish these changes and maybe they will be accepted by upstream. With Windows, you need to beg and pay Microsoft for customizations and hope these changes will not cause other issues. Plus, most space projects are on a tight and limited budgets where management would rather spend on hardware than software.
- dylan604 2y agoWell, if your account is only a Home Edition, you will not get the same support as if you upgrade to Universal Galactic Edition which has a LTS measured in generations.
- freedomben 2y agoAlso, if you want RDP then I think you need to upgrade to Universal Galactic Edition
- pjmlp 2y agoOnly if the ground control station has more than two persons.
- hypeatei 2y agoWonder if it's LTSC or the standard image with candy crush, windows store, and Xbox game app bloat?
- lpribis 2y agoDon't know if it's publically available, but MS makes Windows IoT which is a stripped down distro for embedded systems.
- geepytee 2y agoGenuine question, what would you use instead and why?
- MPSimmons 2y agoDepending on the complexity of the satellite, a linux node, several linux nodes, or a LOT of linux nodes. Or a very small embedded SoC if your satellite is very simple or has a segregated payload.
- jasonwatkinspdx 2y agoReal Time Operating System(s) like VxWorks. Commodity equipment running specialized distros of Linux is a growing thing however.
- MPSimmons 2y agoLinux just mainlined the RTOS patch that a lot of people have used. Including SpaceX - https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20200002390/downloads/20200002390.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20200002390/downloads/20... Linux RT merge: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=baeb9a7d8b60b021d907127509c44507539c15e5 https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
- gosub100 2y agoWhat parts would actually need realtime response? Only thing I can think of would be thrusters, but wouldn't that be solved by an asic? Essentially a network command where you say "I don't care specifically when you do this, but I'm requesting a correction of M-magnitude in this 3-vector. If I don't get an ack within 500ms cancel. "
- jasonwatkinspdx 2y agoNavigation / attitude control needs to be real time. Even if there's a microcontroller at the device, the guidance system receives telemetry and then sends commands. If the send is arbitrarily delayed then the resulting motion won't be what the system desired. The microcontroller can't do the complex calculations on its own because it doesn't have all the telemetry from multiple sensors. Also RTOS tend to have a lot of verification work applied so that you can be confident some facilities just won't fail.
- wongarsu 2y agoThe article doesn't actually involve Windows. They wanted to avoid a satellite going into safemode, which they describe as "the satellite equivalent of a blue screen of death". That's honestly not even a good analogy. The headline is just bad
- hunter2_ 2y agoFor anyone reading only headlines and comments, from TFA: > If the watchdog timer has not been restarted and instead times out after ~30 seconds, the satellite enters something called safemode. Safemode is when all non critical functions are automatically shut down and the satellite becomes entirely focused on generating power by pointing its solar panels towards the Sun and trying to reestablish any communication that was lost. It’s a state the vehicle goes into when something bad happens [...] the satellite equivalent of a blue screen of death. If only Windows would be so kind!
- neuralRiot 2y agoInstalling update 1 of 456. Please don’t turn off your spaceship.
- lisper 2y agoThey're not running Windows. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41651715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41651715
- dekhn 2y ago1998: Windows 95 on Thinkpads (not running system-critical) https://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/05/technology/laptops-on-the-shuttle-age-does-not-matter.html https://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/05/technology/laptops-on-the... Detailed writeup by project manager: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=27043.0 https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=27043.0 (doesn't mention the OS) Some indication the laptops on ISS run linux on HP ZBooks: https://training.linuxfoundation.org/solutions/corporate-solutions/success-stories/linux-foundation-training-prepares-the-international-space-station-for-linux-migration/ https://training.linuxfoundation.org/solutions/corporate-sol...