mazer@asterix.asterix.cns.caltech.edu (Jamie Mazer) (02/19/91)
I'm in the process of trying to find a replacement for one of our lab's
data collection systems. Currently we are runing RTU on a masscomp 5700,
which was "state of the art" when it was purchased many years ago. Now
it's overloaded and underpowered for what we do.
There's a fairly hefty amount of code already written (mine :-) that
we need to run on whatever system we choose as a replacement. So,
I'm looking for a reasonably priced unix-ish real-time OS that I
can run on 386 or 486 box. I have a fairly large package of code
that will be ported, all of the hardware specific parts in a single
small module. However, the user-interface is heavily X11R3 dependent.
So what I'm looking for is:
1. something that looks like unix - at least at the stdio lib level.
2. something that allows me to muck with the hardware without
too much trouble (I don't think I'm capable of writing my
own device drivers from scratch at this point). The hardware
will consist of a some high speed 12 or 16bit DACs and ADCs (at
least 2 of each) and some sort of timer board that can be
used to timestamp incomming TTL pulses - this timestampping
might require writing interupt handlers, which I know how
to handle under DOS, but I don't know how to deal with under
a unix-like OS.
3. runs X - a server isn't critical, since worst comes to
worst, I can hang one of our ncd's off it, if the OS talks
tcp/ip and comes with Xlib and friends.
So far, LynxOS is the only thing I've heard of, and I'm waiting for their
information packet now.
The questions are: Can anyone give me any tips on what else I should be
looking at? and does anyone care to share their experiences with LynxOS?
Please reply to me, I'll summarize and post if there's enough interest.
Thanks,
/Jamie
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