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
chrome OS
SAN FRANCISCO — In a direct challenge to Microsoft, Google announced late Tuesday that it is developing an operating system for PCs based on its Chrome Web browser. The move sharpens the already intense competition between Google and Microsoft, whose
State machine functions and recursive composition
My graduate school research was motivated by a difficulty we have doing real creative engineering in operating systems that may seem ridiculous to people who don’t work in the field. The problem is that we can’t describe the problem. What
Wind River sold to Intel: more reaction
And like Intel, I would argue that mobile software companies are instrumental in making silicon solutions pervasive, because they tick two major check boxes: reference design and support. The hidden asset of mobile software companies Mobile embedded software companies (e.g.
Wind River purchased by Intel
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
Suns tracking SGI
IBM dropped its offer to acquire Sun for $7billion. Sun has now a series of projects for which it has large costs, but no clear method of making money. What did Sun gain from open sourcing Solaris, from giving away
Program structure and threads
Threads were initially used for telephony systems where each request to connect could be given to a new thread to manage. The simplification was, in theory, dramatic. The programmer could just write the code for handling a single line, and
Marine One Blueprints via Pirates Bay
Goodness. The US blueprints for Marine1 show up in Iran. “What appears to be a defense contractor in Bethesda, Md., had a file-sharing program on one of their systems that also contained highly sensitive blueprints for Marine One,” Boback said.
Are threads evil? (updated)
This paper by Prof. Edward Lee explains something of why “threads” are such a painful abstraction. As Prof. Lee notes, threads intrinsically create unspecified program operation (which he calls non-determinism) and resource conflicts which we then attempt to “prune” via
Mobile device security and President Obama
Obama’s fighting hard to keep his Blackberry President Barack Obama will have a beloved BlackBerry — and maybe a second, more secure smartphone-like device — with him in the White House. The president has been adamant about continuing to use