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AMD powered 16 core systems are real
We’re finishing some tests on the IWill 8-chip 16 core server and seeing outstanding timing. RTCore can share Linux with cores or reserve them for real-time. On reserved cores the jitter time we have found to be fundamental never reaches two microseconds, no matter what the system load. On non-reserved, the IWill systems look like…
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The long haul in the embedded software business.
Chris Lanfear from VDC systems asks FSMLabs has the product line, but lacks the market presence and awareness that other companies have invested in with venture-backed capital. We believe the company has largely bootstrapped itself over the years and while this conservative approach has a number of benefits, it is difficult to achieve the market…
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PowerPoint and RocketScience II
In a previous note I objected to venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki’s requests (demands) for shallow and glib sales pitches in PowerPoint, but Professor Edward Tufte is also asking for sales pitches, just ones with more sober disguise. When you read “My other models for NASA are Feynman’s lectures on physics, and the A3 page (or…
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Digital Rights Management and Logic
The Sony DRM fiasco is due to a common failure of requirements management logic. If an engineered system relies on certain properties, whenever you add a new requirement, you need to check consistency. You have a boat that has EnoughCargoSpace and ReasonableEnergyCost and you decide to add the requirement CantLeak. So you encase the entire…
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Power Point, Rocket Science and dangers of compelling stories
In American English, you can say that something is not too difficult by saying “it’s not rocket science.” We don’t have a good idiom for saying the opposite – that something is hard to understand, not bullet-pointable. Edward Tufte dislikes PowerPoint because it can be used in a way that obscures critical data under a…
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Formal methods and academic computer science
Holloway [22] points out that the typical argument in favor of formal methods (that software is bad, unique, and discontinuous; that testing is inadequate; and that formal methods are essential to avoid design flaws) is logically flawed, and unnecessarily complex (in logical terms). He proposes a simpler argument, which is both simple and logically valid:…
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Why programs fail and get hacked
“People’s distrust of the high-pressure engines was confirmed when the boiler of a stationary engine exploded at Greenwich on 8 September 1803. It was the usual tale; the boy who had been trained to work the engine went off to catch eels and a labourer stopped the engine without releasing the safety valve.” Richard Hills,…
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Comparing VXworks to RTLinux
A couple of years ago, one of our salesmen asked us to comment on a comparison between VxWorks and RTLinux performance that had a prospective customer worried. When we tracked down the article, we were dumbfounded that it was being taken seriously. The article was a student paper from a mid-level class in Networks with…
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Handbook of Networked and Embedded Control Systems
You can find an article on writing real-time control loops in RTLinux inside the giant Hristu-Varsakelis, Levine Handbook of Networked and Embedded Control. The article is by Edgar Hilton, Matt Sherer and myself and covers simple loops, loops with data and control going to the non-real-time “client” and loops using the Interface Kit (XML/RPC).