Wind River's upgrade to Linux

Posted May 13, 2005 3:17 UTC (Fri) by bajw (guest, #11712)
In reply to: Wind River's Linux transformation (ZDNet) by clugstj
Parent article: Wind River's Linux transformation (ZDNet)

I don't know, but would pretty confidently bet a nickle they have been finding Linux to be a significant upgrade from VxWorks, and market forces are making them convert to the better platform in order to remain competitive in their field. My guess is their old proprietary system has flatly been outperformed by Linux.

Wind River's upgrade to Linux

Posted May 13, 2005 7:54 UTC (Fri) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link] (1 responses)

> My guess is their old proprietary system has flatly been
> outperformed by Linux.

Since Linux has never been explicitly designed nor optimised for the
kinds of devices VxWorks has, I doubt very much that's true. VxWorks
lacks many of the advances Linux has made in recent years -- but
I'd be surprised if VxWorks didn't beat recent Linux versions in
performance, and more importantly latency, on small single-processor
systems.

Actually it's probably more trouble than it's worth to build a Linux
2.6 kernel for a machine with less than several megabytes of RAM;
even if you could make it fit, you would do so by throwing away all
the lovely page tables and other spendthrift data structures which
have made Linux do so well on modern servers and PCs.

(Not having done this myself, I can't actually vouch for it.)

Wind River's upgrade to Linux

Posted May 13, 2005 17:39 UTC (Fri) by error27 (subscriber, #8346) [Link]

Page tables is such a bad example... Someday you will probably realise how funny your comment was. :P