FSMLabs is making its way through the DO178 requirements and we’ve given a lot of thought to Common Criteria over the last couple years. One of the advantages of DO178 is that it does not accept the totally untested and
Above all, the SUSPENSE: Wind River’s DSO with Robert Mitchum and hippies! (updated)
I’ve been meaning to write about DSO – WindRiver’s attempt to define synthetic “standards” (see the linuxdevices article for technical detail and a more serious approach). “Is DSO hype or substance?” asked Wind River CEO Ken Klein during the sponsored
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
Priority Inheritance: Hack or Error
The subject of priority inheritance has come up again on the Linux kernel mailing list and Torvalds correctly notes “Friends don’t let friends use priority inheritance”. Just don’t do it. If you really need it, your system is broken anyway.
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
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
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