RTOS brands

Hi All,

I have tried to get some information about RTOS from different suppliers, but I find it hard to cut trough the marketing and sales pitch persons. Before you can get any answers, you have to answer 50 questions to get any info at all and then they want to demo their excellent RTOS. Taking more of your time. So I thought I might ask the community if they have any real life experiences and 'gotchas' to share.

Have anybody used the PPC405 inside a Virtex-4 with a RTOS? Which one and what grade would you give it?

My application is a central control FPGA which handles some communication via RocketIO and some data recording and calculation. Hmmm.... it is a general question.

Cheers, /Rick

Reply to
Rick North
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Rick, please email me - I'm aware of at least one RTOS developed for that combination, but I don't want to post an advert. ;)

pete

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Reply to
Pete Fenelon

For just a real-time kernel I would use uCOS/II. It's inexpensive yet solid, and it gets the job done. If you need real-time and you want all the Unix trimmings consider VxWorks from Wind River. It's _spendy_, and the support folks are all snobs, but it the RTOS part is solid and it does have all the trimmings. I'd use VxWorks again, but only after considering alternatives like Linux and eCos.

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Reply to
Tim Wescott

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Reply to
Ansatt

I'd echo Tim's sentiment,

Regarding VxWorks vs. Linux--- we found that a commercial real-time Linux was no cheaper than VxWorks and had no support. VxWorks is not cheap by any stretch--around $7K per seat. But, the RTOS has been around forever and is qualified by many US govt agencies (NASA, DoD, et al). I'm utterly

*unimpressed* by their host/build environment and the fact it sits on top of GNU tools. However, the target OS is good.

I share your frustrations with the RTOS vendors. My digging convinced me that you are not going to get any commercial RTOS for less than $5K. Pretty steep for any small system...

Paul

Reply to
Bo

Responding to a poster's question is not advertising, if it is an appropriate option and you make any affiliations clear. Newsgroups are not just about helping a thread's OP - they are about spreading information, and (by archiving) preserving information for future readers. So take the conversation offline to email if its appropriate (for example, if you want to keep pricing information confidential), and keep it online while it is of interest to the newsgroup.

mvh.,

David

Reply to
David Brown

OK - well I can make two suggestions!

If you want a true hard RTOS, ETAS (my employer - I manage the team that did the port, but I am speaking entirely in a personal capacity here) has a port of RTA-OSEK for the 405 on a Virtex. It works with the Diab toolchain. As you may know, OSEK is a hard-realtime OS designed for the automotive industry, mainly on the powertrain side of things,

- so everything is statically-configured, and there are few 'luxuries'

There's a datasheet on

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along with details of how to contact our sales team.

Or...

If you want a more familiar OS, I know that Linux has been ported to the

405/Virtex combo - I've been playing at home with a Project Blackdog Linux server and that's implemented on a 405/Virtex (and is *phenomenally* cute). I'm sure you could port RTLinux for that platform to give you a nice little microcontroller with a very rich operating system.

pete

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Reply to
Pete Fenelon

A number of years ago, I used AMX-86 from KADAK. Awesome product, awesome support. It's been many years (almost 20) but I'd certainly look to them if I were in the market. They do support PPC.

I've used uC/OS as supplied by Netburner for their modules, and had no difficulty. Didn't ask much of it either, though.

I used Nucleus PLUS a few years back. I liked the kernel, but was less impressed with some of the "add-on" products. Mentor owns them now, I believe.

about 6 years back I used QNX on a real-time image processing application. It's more of a full-featured OS than the others mentioned above, but it was more than up to the task. Especially nice for distributed applications.

These were all Intel x86 and Motorola ColdFire applications, so I can't comment about PPC.

FWIW, -=Dave

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Reply to
Dave Hansen

I would say 'acceptable'. The API might function, but AFAIK memory management and IPC are not crash-friendly.

Then you didn't dig deep enough. Or some people tried to rob you. Have you looked at Sciopta?

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Reply to
Boudewijn Dijkstra

Xilinx ship the Linux port in the box now, according to their sales literature.

Reply to
larwe

uCOS/II. $1200 one-time per-design fee, the last time I looked (which was, admittedly, a long time ago). You get the book with the CD, download the latest upgrades from the website, and go to town. You don't even pay anything until you're done and decide to go into production.

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Reply to
Tim Wescott

Must have been a while back. My quote from them was ~$9K--for bundled package that included TCP/IP drivers, and the other things that are Std with VxWorks....

Perhaps the cost is related to processor and the more popular processors yield cheaper OS's... I don't know.

Bo

Reply to
Bo

Never heard of them. Will check it out...

Thanx, Bo

Reply to
Bo

Several years. Sigh. It appears that they've gone over to the dark side.

How's eCos these days?

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Tim Wescott
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Reply to
Tim Wescott

Look at RTEMS at

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It supports 14 different CPU families currently, including:

  • powerpc - IBM and Motorola PowerPC 4xx, 5xx, 6xx, 7xx, 8xx, 74xx, and 75xx

It is free, open-source software.

~Dave~

Reply to
Dave

It's still working fine for me...

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Reply to
Grant Edwards

Great replies, Thank you all for sharing.

I like the Pete Fenelon msg about true hard RTOS and looked around more and found one in Sweden. Sierra by Realfast,

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I surely will have a closer look at uCos and QNX.

Again, Thank you all it was my first post in this newsgroup and I think I will monitor it more closely

Cheers, Rick

Rick North skrev:

Reply to
Rick North

With commercial support if you require!

The free community support is better than anything I have ever got as a result of paying for it!

Paul

Reply to
Paul Whitfield

Did you go to my employers web-site :

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?

Check out the PDFs found there and if it is not enough info drop me an email snipped-for-privacy@.com

But be aware: It is direct-message-passing, no global variables and _no_ semaphores :-) but with 6 system-calls you can build 80% of your application !

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Reply to
42Bastian Schick

What ?? :-) *hmpf* check out

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42Bastian
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42Bastian Schick

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