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
Back from India
We were going into a government facility in Mumbai, and the guard points at me and asks, as if finding it hard to believe “He is a foreigner?” This was my fourth visit to India and, like all the others
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)
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
GreenHills, foreigners, and the gummi bear threat
When GreenHills launched their anti-Linux offensive, they crossed a line – and I doubt they even knew it. To cast doubt on the value of Linux in critical applications, GreenHills tried to create a scare about the nationality and “loyalty”