Systems software technology and business
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 years. The basic programming model has not changed in years. Even FSM’s original RTOS and [...]
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 point.
In other words, if Wind River had enabled the next generation of Cisco and Apple [...]
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 earlier note, I argued that we should design real-time multi-threaded applications to minimize the need [...]