4 ms·

"x86" and "RTOS" don't really work together, given SMM, complex caches, and so on. If you have any sort of high-performance task, you'll likely want to have an

by theamk 2y ago

"x86" and "RTOS" don't really work together, given SMM, complex caches, and so on. If you have any sort of high-performance task, you'll likely want to have an separate embedded MCU (or a dozen of them) to control it. And embedded stuff has a ton of OS'es, such as FreeRTOS, Zephyr, ThreadX... And there are plenty of proprietary solutions, like Nvidia DriveOS. The embedded OSes are quite limited compared to regular ones like Linux - the task scheduler is present, but everything else (like processes, filesystem, dynamic file loading, binary tools, etc...) is either missing or optional.

quanto 2y ago
I am aware that FreeRTOS and Zephyr are popular but in your opinion, do these form a comprehensive ecosystem and foundation for engineers build robots? I am not aware of any major robotics projects using these MCU OSes as a paradigm (as opposed to an auxiliary component connected to a main OS). I had a robotics colleague at a high profile lab saying that Windows is the de facto standard.
- theamk 2y ago
  I mostly work with mobile robotics, and using Windows sounds like an absolute craziness to me. The main PC runs some sort of Linux, often with disk in read-only mode. I've heard this is not the case in all industries, and that many industrial projects (as in factory automation) use Windows, however crazy it may sound. But I don't have a first-hand knowledge of this. All software I've worked with was built from scratch. We've used plenty of libraries, but this was all generic stuff, all the "comprehensive ecosystem and foundation" was our own. But compared to the actual business logic, that foundation is pretty simple - you need math libraries, some sort of RPC, logging, process management, replay/sim. This does not include device drivers - there is a very good chance you'll need to write them scratch anyway. And none of this is even close in complexity to things like path optimizer.
  - quanto 2y ago
    Thanks for your detailed response. Your observations match my own as well. I do think that the foundation is more complex than your quick comment suggests though (kudos to your team and its foundational work for making it seem trivial. that's exactly what a good framework should do.)

by theamk 2y ago

quanto 2y ago

I am aware that FreeRTOS and Zephyr are popular but in your opinion, do these form a comprehensive ecosystem and foundation for engineers build robots? I am not aware of any major robotics projects using these MCU OSes as a paradigm (as opposed to an auxiliary component connected to a main OS). I had a robotics colleague at a high profile lab saying that Windows is the de facto standard.

theamk 2y ago
I mostly work with mobile robotics, and using Windows sounds like an absolute craziness to me. The main PC runs some sort of Linux, often with disk in read-only mode. I've heard this is not the case in all industries, and that many industrial projects (as in factory automation) use Windows, however crazy it may sound. But I don't have a first-hand knowledge of this. All software I've worked with was built from scratch. We've used plenty of libraries, but this was all generic stuff, all the "comprehensive ecosystem and foundation" was our own. But compared to the actual business logic, that foundation is pretty simple - you need math libraries, some sort of RPC, logging, process management, replay/sim. This does not include device drivers - there is a very good chance you'll need to write them scratch anyway. And none of this is even close in complexity to things like path optimizer.
- quanto 2y ago
  Thanks for your detailed response. Your observations match my own as well. I do think that the foundation is more complex than your quick comment suggests though (kudos to your team and its foundational work for making it seem trivial. that's exactly what a good framework should do.)