dan@flood.com (Dan Ingold) (06/20/91)
Does anyone out there have any experience with a real-time "Unix- compatible" operating system called LynxOS (Lynx Real-Time Systems, Campbell, CA)? We are considering using it for a communications controller project, but hate to buy it solely on the basis of its marketing slicks. I suspect that many real-time programmers are not particularly Unix-fluent. We're just the opposite: we do little real-time work, and work most often with Unix (SunOS). The problem we need to solve is quite straightforward, so minimizing our learning curve and pain is the most important criterion. Please reply directly to me at the address below. If appropriate, I will summarize the results to the net. Thanks! Dan -- Dan Ingold The Flood Group, Inc. Internet: dan@flood.com Lawndale, Ca.
miklg@sono.uucp (Michael Goldman ) (06/20/91)
dan@flood.com (Dan Ingold) writes: >Does anyone out there have any experience with a real-time "Unix- >compatible" operating system called LynxOS (Lynx Real-Time Systems, >Campbell, CA)? We are considering using it for a communications >controller project, but hate to buy it solely on the basis of its >marketing slicks. >I suspect that many real-time programmers are not particularly >Unix-fluent. We're just the opposite: we do little real-time work, >and work most often with Unix (SunOS). The problem we need to solve >is quite straightforward, so minimizing our learning curve and pain >is the most important criterion. We bought LynxOS as to evaluate against VxWorks. The benchmarks we did showed Lynx to be faster in many ways, though we're only just now looking at interrupt latencies. The only limitation for us was that they are not yet ported to the 68040. Their salesmen was claiming that some of their customers are running 68030 code on 68040s, but the techies from Lynx and Motorola claim that that is impossible - the MMUs and caching considerations are too different. It will be a non-trivial issue porting to the 68040 compared to the relatively painless conversion from the 68020/68851 to the 68030, and my conversations with the Lynx people convinced me that while they are perfectly capable of doing it, they haven't looked at it seriously, and won't unless we make a $$ commitment. For Unix fans, it is almost Unix, though aliasing and VI are slightly different. We've started looking at UniFLEX as another Unix-type that already runs on 68040s, and takes considerably less memory (100K-150K vs. 400K-1M). UniFLEX is only just now porting to 386, SPARC, and 88000. They have a full X, and NFS and seem a lot cheaper for the unlimited binaries we're after. I've just checked their references and sounds like a solid kernel. UniFLEX is in Chapel Hill, NC 919-493-1451. Good Luck Michael Goldman
dan@flood.com (Dan Ingold) (06/21/91)
In one short day I have received MANY replies to my inquiry on LynxOS. Enough for me to see that I should have provided a bit more information. Namely, our customer has placed some constraints on the implementation that prevent us from using some great offerings from Motorola, AMD or other vendors. The hardware platform dictated to us is a STDbus 386 "PC-compatible" board from ProLog. Memory is no problem, we'll have at least 4 Mb, more if needed (comments?). We'll be communicating over Ethernet, using TCP/IP, with a Sun (big surprise, given our SunOS prediliction). The task is to create an Ethernet-to-custom-fiberoptic-network-like- thing bridge. (Please, no comments from the protocol police. :-) Obviously, then, we will also need to create a custom device driver for the fiber-optic boards. Unfortunately, I still know little about that interface. The data rates are low, only about 1 Mb/sec on the fiber. Hope the additional info helps constrain the search. And thanks to netland for the great replies to date. BTW, I fixed my signature file so that the UUNET address is no longer truncated. --Dan -- Dan Ingold The Flood Group, Inc. Internet: dan@flood.com Lawndale, Ca. UUCP: ...!uunet!flood!dan (213) 219-1155