Hello all.
I am starting a research to identify a RTOS to be deployed in several medical products. The product line includes some low to medium end products based on Xscale (PXA255) and some medium to high end products based on x86 compatible processors (Geode at the moment, some Intel offspring in a near future).
Some of the main requirements I have to guide my research are:
1- Reputable manufacturer (in both market time and product record.) 2- Support to the architectures above. 3- Decent development tools. 4- Good networking support. 5- Decent graphics support (optimized graphics drivers desirable.) 6- File system with fault recovery (FAT16/32 compatible if possible). 7- Flash file system availability. 8- Scalability (low footprint on small systems).Some of the products may work stad alone whereas others must be network connected to exchange information with other medical systems (clynical software, image archiving systems etc.) and that is the reason for the
4th item above. Different resource requirements are foreseen, going from moderate (when information exchanged is mostly patient related data, and system status and configuration data) to high as running some sort of java virtual machine (at low priority) is a possible requirement to make software development people's life easier when developing some clients to be connected to the aforementioned systems.There are some other requirements but the above are the most important and are in (sort of) order of importance for all the personnel involved in product development (for many of them, item 3 should be on the top of the list.) Also the above above may seem somewhat limited but I am assuming others more technical such as IPC mechanisms, fault tolerance, fault recovery capability, memory protection between processes, bounded latency, priority inversion mitigation and so forth are met in some way by the candidates on the top of my list.
After a quick preliminary research I am considering the following RTOSes: QNX, LynxOS, VxWorks, Integrity and OSE.
I believe each product may excel in some requirements but not in others. Therefore I would appreciate if you folks could provide some insights on this matter to provide me with some information that help me to make a decision. Suggestions on others RTOSes that could fit and are worth taking a look are welcome too.
Thank you very much in advance for your help.
Josias.