Tag Archives: real-time

RTOS design and embedded system development

Posted on July 15, 2009 by admin

Real-time operating systems are either a solved problem or a backwater of engineering design. Threads, semaphores, mutexes, some basic I/O, priority scheduling all of this has been more or less standardized in the  POSIX 1003.13 smaller profiles (51,52) for many … Continue reading →

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Wind River purchased by Intel

Posted on June 5, 2009 by admin

If anything, Wind River’s inability to breakout, despite a once Microsoft-like position of dominance, is a by-product of their failure to meaningfully go “up the stack” and away from their historical focus on the silicon layer as a primary differentiation … Continue reading →

Posted in embedded systems, handset, intellectual property, marketing, operating systems, software business, software engineering | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Are threads evil? (updated)

Posted on February 25, 2009 by admin

This paper by Prof. Edward Lee explains something of why “threads” are such a painful abstraction.  As Prof. Lee notes, threads intrinsically create non-determinism and resource conflicts which we then attempt to “prune” via synchronization and complex tools. In an … Continue reading →

Posted in embedded systems, operating systems, real-time, rtlinux, software engineering | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment