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Brendan wrote:
As far as I know; RDOS is used for a few petrol/gas pumps and ATM machines. It's not a general purpose OS.
Well, it could be turned into a general purpose OS, but that would require many developers creating a large number of applications, and I don't see that happen to any new "hobby" OS. Linux was able to walk that road, but I doubt there will be more OSes that will.
Brendan wrote:
I'd guess that what happens is one company (the "customer") asks another company to design an embedded system under contract, and that company (which I suspect rdos is directly involved with in some way) builds the embedded system on top of RDOS without the customer having any idea what the OS is, without the customer choosing the OS, and without the customer caring about the OS at all (as long as the application they wanted works).
Rather RDOS was selected as we moved to more general purpose hardware.
Brendan wrote:
and without anyone ever asking why a better/more suitable OS (e.g. QNX, Linux, ...) wasn't used.
We will get the answer to that question in due time. A guy at my work is working on a Java implementation running under Linux for our future terminals. I hope he is finished with it before I retire in 10 years, because I don't want to support RDOS indefinitely other than doing things I want to do on it. We will also get an answer to if this platform is really better suited for it or not. Installation wise (and also for maintenance), I think it will be a lot more complicated, and I'm also not sure it will work better. But we will see.
Last edited by rdos on Sat Apr 23, 2016 3:07 am, edited 1 time in total.
Schol-R-LEA wrote:
If you were to tell me that there is even one project OS being discussed in this group that is installed on any live hardware other than the systems it is being developed on, I would call you a liar. Not even SkyOS had a hundred installations, never mind a thousand, and to the best of my knowledge every installation of it was by someone collaborating or planning to collaborate on the development of the OS.
You better believe it. It's running in Sweden, Switzerland and Denmark. The installations in Switzerland are embedded, while the ones in Sweden are standalone payment terminals.
Schol-R-LEA wrote:
Hell, I doubt even Haiku or ReactOS have a thousand live installations. I don't care how long you say you have been working on rdos, the claim is preposterous.
Started 1988, but it wasn't used professionally until about 2010.
Yeah, I saw the timeline on your site. As for the installed sites, I was mistakenly assuming - in part because of the references to x86 protected mode and FAT file systems on said timeline - that it was running on stock hardware as a desktop/RT combination similar to some QNX or eCOS installations. As I later said, embedded RTOS is very different situation indeed; aside from the fact that it almost invariably moves the system out of the realm of 'hobby' to that of 'commercial project', an embedded OS can have far more installed versions than a desktop or server system, and has very different requirements regarding user interface, system updating, etc.
(Mind you, 'commercial' does not imply that it is more professional or competently written than a hobby project, in fact my experience is quite the opposite. I have never seen a hobby or academic project turn into the sort of CF that is a daily occurrence in commercial IT, which is one of the reasons I am no longer working in commercial IT.)
I honestly didn't expect anyone posting here to be working in that space, 'real-time operating system' or not (especially since most of the people here claiming that their OS is real-time have no clear idea of what 'real-time' means, and think that just because their context switching is fast and they can run a quick-twitch video game or a music player, then it qualifies as real time - whereas if anything an RTOS has more concerns about being too fast rather than too slow, and user interactions are almost never a real-time concern even when on a real-time OS - an RTOS generally will block on non-critical processes to allow the mission-critical processes to operate, and UI is rarely mission-critical).
Rev. First Speaker Schol-R-LEA;2 LCF ELF JAM POEE KoR KCO PPWMTF Ordo OS Project
Lisp programmers tend to seem very odd to outsiders, just like anyone else who has had a religious experience they can't quite explain to others.
Schol-R-LEA wrote:Yeah, I saw the timeline on your site. As for the installed sites, I was mistakenly assuming - in part because of the references to x86 protected mode and FAT file systems on said timeline - that it was running on stock hardware as a desktop/RT combination similar to some QNX or eCOS installations. As I later said, embedded RTOS is very different situation indeed; aside from the fact that it almost invariably moves the system out of the realm of 'hobby' to that of 'commercial project', an embedded OS can have far more installed versions than a desktop or server system, and has very different requirements regarding user interface, system updating, etc.
(Mind you, 'commercial' does not imply that it is more professional or competently written than a hobby project, in fact my experience is quite the opposite. I have never seen a hobby or academic project turn into the sort of CF that is a daily occurrence in commercial IT, which is one of the reasons I am no longer working in commercial IT.)
I honestly didn't expect anyone posting here to be working in that space, 'real-time operating system' or not (especially since most of the people here claiming that their OS is real-time have no clear idea of what 'real-time' means, and think that just because their context switching is fast and they can run a quick-twitch video game or a music player, then it qualifies as real time - whereas if anything an RTOS has more concerns about being too fast rather than too slow, and user interactions are almost never a real-time concern even when on a real-time OS - an RTOS generally will block on non-critical processes to allow the mission-critical processes to operate, and UI is rarely mission-critical).
The installations run on standard hardware (industrial x86 boards), and RDOS really isn't an RTOS with fixed response guarantees which would move it out of the realm of more general purpose OSes. We also have an elaborate upgrade process so the installations are not fixed, rather we are doing regular updates. The stand-alone terminals also make use of JPEGs, animations and have an MP3 player for auditory feedback. They are also connected to a host system using a TCP/IP connection.
OTOH, I've presented ideas before here on how to use a single core of the processor to create a real RTOS that could communicate with RDOS, but I've not yet done this.
