The perenial "Nuclear Power Plant" example

Posted Oct 15, 2004 16:34 UTC (Fri) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)
In reply to: The perenial "Nuclear Power Plant" example by simlo
Parent article: Approaches to realtime Linux

Linux doesn't have all that much code if you disable everything. Of course, I'd personally design a nuclear reactor with a microcontroller to handle all the really fast hard realtime stuff, set up a watchdog to make sure the operator's computer is responding within a couple of minutes, and run Linux on the operator's computer. Linux does have far more code than a microcontroller program, no matter what you do. For that matter, with microcontrollers, you could probably set up a set of redundant ones with voting schemes just to make sure that failures don't cause problems. It's not like you're going to blow your power plant budget on microcontrollers.