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
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
Proving Operating Systems Correct:#8
One of the longstanding problems with operating systems is that there is no way to validate their correctness in the same way that engineers can calculate the ability of a beam to carry a weight or a wire to carry
The romance of trade and fuzzy slippers
Commerce used to be more fashionable. The French historian Fernand Braudel writes that in the 1630s “ten ships a year from the Indian ocean, from Calicut, Surat, or Msulipatam, and the odd Portugese ship out of Goa were still arriving
Spyware and Security
So an exec from Claria (formerly known as Gator) heads off to the US Government’s . department of Homeland Security. As of today, if you Google “claria spyware” you get 44000 hits. The commercial (and governmental) utility of building security
RTLinux easy but RT hard.
I wrote a chapter for an academic book recently and the publisher sent me a “copyright assignment” form ( don’t even start) that asked me, among other things, to provide a warranty that it was perfectly safe to use the
Embedded productivity and engineering skills
I was at some trade show wandering around with a cynic who was pointing out that every booth advertised productivity improvements. How many improvements we’ve made to productivity, and this has gone on for years” he said,“By now, we must
Synchronization blues
Synchronization is hard in real-time applications, but not as hard as people imagine. If you follow a few simple rules you can make it manageable. Never force priority and mutual exclusion to fight each other. You can’t mean “Task A
Class and lack thereof
From the always readable Joel on Software: Attention, FogBugz competitors: a court has ruled that you are welcome to continue to advertise your products when people search for FogBugz on Google. I actually don’t think there’s anything wrong with this
Soft real-time and software costs
Imagine designing an automobile with a motor that runs really well on a demonstration frame, with none of those heavy panels or safety devices, and only tested on a short flat track. Imagine an engineering team designing an automobile or