Andy Bechtolscheim says: It’s really hard to add value to Windows. Whatever you add, Microsoft is going to take away from you. Linux has opportunities. There are many ways to add value. There are lots of things Sun customers expect
The Embedded Enterprise, Pruit-Igoe, Ayn-Rand, the telecommunications stack and why software does not suck
Programmers will readily tell you that “Windows sucks” or “Linux sucks” or “POSIX sucks” why this or that software is badly designed, bloated, slow, buggy, un-needed, ugly, and generally disgusting. But, Windows is actually an immensely useful and sophisticated program
Soft real time continues to sag
Paul McKenney once wrote: Despite such complications, priority inheritance works reasonably well for exclusive locks, and is a major component of Ingo Molnar’s CONFIG_PREEMPT_RT patch. There are strongly held opinions both for and against priority inheritance, for example. http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT7168794919.html in
Soft real-time and soft design strategies versus QOS
[ see revised version ] (edited August 18 2007 to add back link and formatting) “Soft real-time” is a perfect example of the “soft design” I was complaining about in the previous post. There are perfectly good ways of characterizing
Programming design style
Someone needs to come up with a slick name for “designed to fail during test instead of production” or for the more common “soft” type of programming. When we write code, we assume we screwed up somewhere, an assumption based
The embedded enterprise
It is now possible to put together sophisticated and powerful embedded and control systems that are mostly composed of pre-existing working software. One of the demonstrations we showed at AMD’s recent embedded workshop was a small two processor (4 core)
Speculation on modularity and information theory
One way of defining modules is by what engineers have to know. If a program X consists of components X1 … Xn then we can say Xi is a module if a programmer can modify it without learning “much” about
multicore and virtualization and real-time provisioning
We added the “reservation” capability to RTCore real-time POSIX threads a couple of years ago. Normally, the client platform operating system shares the processor with RTCore threads as a completely pre-emptible low priority thread. This works exceptionally well. Worst case
Single core cell phone solution and marketing vs engineering
FSMLabs is finally able to discuss the single core cell phone handset solution we developed with Infineon Technologies last year. This system is cool technology – literally – since it allows parts count reduction on the handset and that reduces
Microkernels and why academic OS research is boring
Andy Tanenbaum writes a defense of microkernels that (1) misses the content of Linus Torvald’s critique, (2) ignores the most relevant paper on software development, David Parnas’ Software Jewels paper, and (3) pretends RTLinux does not exist. The problem with