
Wind River VxWorks Platforms 6.9 RTOS [pdf] - Alupis
https://www.windriver.com/products/product-notes/PN_VE_6_9_Platform_0311.pdf
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metaphor
Last time I checked, ~US$30k per development license...just in case anyone was
wondering.

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fpoling
I suppose the idea of selling only to those who can pay is in Wind River DNA.

I worked for a company that WR bought in 2000. We had a product where it was
possible for a small shop to get a license for 1000 USD or so. Wind River
canceled that and the cheapest license became at least 15K. The claim was that
the money came from big customers and it was “wasteful” to deal with smaller
guys. Yet it was the small guys that provided effective advertisement for the
product to bring attention of bigger customers.

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pstuart
I worked for a company that WR bought around that time. WR management seemed
to be into "retail therapy" \-- buying stuff for the sake of the purchase with
no concern or intent on how to integrate it in.

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nairboon
Any comments on this submission? 6.9 is somewhat old by now,and the dev
tooling around it "works" but is quite buggy sometimes...

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pseudosudoer
My "favorite" bug on 6.9 is that if number of symbols in your binaries exceeds
some magic limit, workbench will fail 100% of the time to connect to the
remote debug server... We exclusively use logs to debug on VxWorks.

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planteen
It's been a while since I used VxWorks, but I hated Workbench as well (prefer
using a plain old makefile). One of my favorite features of VxWorks was the
shell you could get on a serial port. It was quite powerful, even letting you
do REPL with C functions which was pretty awesome for debugging.

Another "favorite" feature of VxWorks was how they disabled floating point by
default in tasks (at least on the LEON and PPC). Always led to confusion and
frustration by someone new to the platform.

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scandox
Can someone explain to me why anyone needs this? I once had to try to use it
with some weird Intel SOC but I gave up. So...Real question.

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moftz
Are you asking why anyone needs an RTOS? It provides a very robust solution
that sits somewhere between running a plain old OS like Linux and running
baremetal C on a microprocesser. You get the speed benefit of baremetal but
also get a scheduler and a whole bunch of multiprocessing structure to run
lots of applications at once without worrying about manually switching or
trying to create a massive main.c to do everything. VxWorks specifically runs
on lots of industrial computers such that tasks can get done in a timely
manner with little overhead.

VxWorks powers the Mars Rovers Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, Mars
Reconnaissance Orbiter, and SpaceX Dragon. VxWorks also powers BMW iDrive, the
Apache Longbow helicopter, and the Apple Airport Extreme and Linksys WRT54G
routers. It's in a lot of things and what it's not in, FreeRTOS is probably
the RTOS of choice.

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elteto
According to the SpaceX flight software team neither Falcon or Dragon run
VxWorks, they run a custom Linux (see [0]).

[0] [https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/9243/what-
computer...](https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/9243/what-computer-and-
software-is-used-by-the-falcon-9)

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Alupis
They won't be using "off the shelf" Ubuntu or Fedora... this'll be the linux
kernel with RTOS patches (either done on their own or using something like
"RTLinux/Wind River Linux").

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elteto
I never said they would be running a vanilla distro though. I said "custom"
for that reason.

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brianolson
ok, VxWorks exists. Is there something new and interesting?

