[ale] Linux vs XP Embedded

[Joe Knapka]

Bjorn Dittmer-Roche <bjorn at sccs.swarthmore.edu> writes:

> I'm no expert but I've done a bit of research on the topic. If you are not
> doing serious real-time, either OS should be fine as far as scheduling.
> You can expect simmilar performance and latency out of them and you'll
> have to actually do benchmarking to determine which performs better with
> the hardware in question. Linux is a joy to program and some people really
> like to program windows, too, so I would make that decision based on the
> experience/preferance of the admins/programmers and, ahem, the need for
> reliability.
> 
> FreeBSD is another great option for high performance/small footprint/no
> charge. It's got great threading and very good latency and linux binary
> comatibility which, in amny cases, outperforms "real" Linux.
> 
> If XP/Linux 2.6/FreeBSD won't cut it in the scheduling department, you
> need something more serious.

We're already using VxWorks in a similar application.  Apparently we
don't like it, but I've never done any work on that system, so I don't
know the details.

> You can't do better than QNX. QNX is really
> quite increadible. It's posix compliant, real-time, well supported and if
> you need to write your own drivers for anything, it will take much less
> time in QNX than anything else because the drivers run in protected
> memory space.

Really? That's cool. Hope I don't have to write any drivers, though :-)

> The "real-time"  versions of linux don't use the same userland API's as
> normal processes, so I'm told that as a result they are difficult to
> program and have some annoying restrictions, so I would stay away from
> that.

That was my impression.

OK, thanks, I'll keep those options in mind.

-- Joe

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