Hello all.
I am starting a research to identify a RTS 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
RTSes: QNX, LS, VxWorks, Integrity and SE.
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 RTSes that could fit and
are worth taking a look are welcome too.
Thank you very much in advance for your help.
Josias.

Josias R. P. Langoni wrote:
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).

Consider Express Logic & ThreadX/NetX/FileX:

http://www.expresslogic.com

Neil

After a quick preliminary research I am considering the following
RTSes: QNX, LS, VxWorks, Integrity and SE.

The list definitely lacks of

Time (www.on-time.com) RTS-32 (Win32 compatible) for X86
and
their partners ebsnet (www.ebsnetinc.com) RTKernelRISC for X-Scale.

Using RTS-32 (32bit) for X86 and its predecessor RTKernel (16bit) for more
than ten years now.
Very small footprints possible, very small interrrupt latencies, extremely
good support (f. e. in case you need drivers for special hardware).

Juergen

Neil Bradley wrote:
Josias R. P. Langoni wrote:
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).

Consider Express Logic & ThreadX/NetX/FileX:

http://www.expresslogic.com

Neil

It was in my list. I just forgot to mention it.

Josias.

Sorry for replying to myself. I appreciated the inputs. Though it's
great having so many choices, it makes life hard when one has to make a
decision. That's why I tend to narrow my search on those RTSes I
mentioned in my post.

I wonder if there is no person that worked with one of those brands
willing to share their experience with them as it's hard to figure out
the real virtues and limitations of such products base only upon
manufacturer's catalogues or websites. For instance, from what I could
learn from reading their website I wasn't quite impressed by VxWorks
(5.x) as far as development tools are concerned though AFAIK it is one
of the main if not the main player in RTS and related stuff market.

Thanks again and my best regards.

Josias.

"Josias R. P. Langoni" <jrplangoni@yahoo.comwrote in message
news:1109889947.257475.89520@
I wonder if there is no person that worked with one of those brands
willing to share their experience with them as it's hard to figure out
the real virtues and limitations of such products base only upon
manufacturer's catalogues or websites.

I have worked extensively with ThreadX and NetX over the last few years with
some exposure to FileX. I am very happy with the quality of the
systems
and the performance. The memory footprint is relatively small and when we
have had any questions or issues (most of them our fault or lack of
understanding)
the support has been excellent. When there were any issues, they were fixed
very
quickly.

I have used VRTX (many years ago) and uCS and ThreadX is definitely a
better
product than these. It is a microkernel and doesn't have the services
available in
the Linux based or Wind river products but the speed and response are
significantly
better (for a given MHz/CPU).

I would have no hestation in reccomending ThreadX/NetX/FileX if it meets
your
requirements (i.e. a solid, low footprint platform). I have not used their
graphics
library but based on my experience with them I would assume it is also solid
and
reliable.

Stan Katz

Josias R. P. Langoni wrote:
-SNIP-

>After a quick preliminary research I am considering the following
RTSes: QNX, LS, VxWorks, Integrity and SE.

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 RTSes that could fit and
are worth taking a look are welcome too.

Thank you very much in advance for your help.

Josias.

MicroC/S-II and the uC/FS Embedded File System from Micrium www.ucos-ii.com
meet the requirements you list and it will save you some big $$$.
To meet you medical needs, Validated Software (www.validatedsoftware.com)
offers complete 510K ready Validation Suites for the Micrium products that
are suitable for all classes of medical devices.

Scott

Josias R. P. Langoni wrote:
Sorry for replying to myself. I appreciated the inputs. Though it's
great having so many choices, it makes life hard when one has to make a
decision. That's why I tend to narrow my search on those RTSes I
mentioned in my post.

I wonder if there is no person that worked with one of those brands
willing to share their experience with them as it's hard to figure out
the real virtues and limitations of such products base only upon
manufacturer's catalogues or websites. For instance, from what I could
learn from reading their website I wasn't quite impressed by VxWorks
(5.x) as far as development tools are concerned though AFAIK it is one
of the main if not the main player in RTS and related stuff market.

We are working with QNX, RTAI-Linux and Integrity. From a technological
point of view we found that QNX is the most flexible RTS. It is
scalable without any kernel modification from a full blown standalon
real-time operating system with SMP support to a deeply embedded RTS
for automotive and medical applications. Because of its own windowing
system 'Photon' and XFree86 support, it has also a lot of features for
desktop applications. The support of x86 desktop systems is outstanding
the Eclipse IDE works on top of QNX6 (self hosted), Windows and Linux.

Best Regards

Armin

Thanks again and my best regards.

Josias.