unhd (Roger Gonzalez ) (07/03/90)
Does anyone have experience developing in VxWorks on one of the Mizar/Sun integrated systems? I've been reading the glossies that they sent me, and it looks too good to be true. I'm mainly interested in the 3U format cards. I have some questions, though. Wind River quotes $80,000 for a source license, but much less for a "1 year" source license. What is a 1 year source license? What does it prohibit after the 1 year? Does the code self-destruct ala Mission Impossible? :-) We are a non-profit lab associated with UNH, and I'm hoping that we would get an educational discount, but even a discounted $80K is too much. Are there problems with using foreign boards in the Mizar system? Our existing system (Ironics P/32 - don't buy one) complains bitterly when some foreign boards are in the bus. How difficult is it to get support from Mizar when there is a problem? Right now, when we call our vendor, there is a lot of finger pointing between the hardware and software people, and then it usually comes down to "oh, well if you pay $1200 for this hardware patch, it should fix the problem." We want to avoid this. What are peoples feelings on Gespac? Is VxWorks available for it, or are you stuck with OS-9 (as one of my coworkers put so eloquently, the operating system used in the TRS-80 color computer :-) I'm a Unix programmer, so the Mizar solution looked much better to me than having an OS-9 development environment. Does anybody know how much of a power pig one of the target Mizar systems would be? Our 6U cards suck an amp into the bus terminators alone! We will have to drive the thing off batteries, so this is an important issue. Thanks for your time, Roger Gonzalez -- UUCP: ..!uunet!unhd!rg | USPS: Marine Systems Engineering Laboratory BITNET: r_gonzalez at unhh | University of New Hampshire PHONE: (603) 862-4600 | Marine Programs Building FAX: (603) 862-4399 | Durham, NH 03824-3525
mo@messy.bellcore.com (Michael O'Dell) (07/04/90)
Back when there was a Prisma, we check-out lots of stuff for the service processor in the machine and VxWorks won by a landslide. Familiar programming interfaces, good network support, great cross-machine support with across-the-network debugging from a Sun workstation, etc, etc, etc. VxWorks just comes across as something built by people who wanted to get something done in a systems sense, not just build a little kernel for multiprogramming. The VxWorks/Heurikon 68030 development crates we bought from Heurikon worked as advertised and all the software did likewise. We did NOT buy the 80K source license, but got some of the stuff for retargetting, etc. We actually didn't WANT to hack the source - a real requirement was that we didn't want to own the base software in the service processor and not having source encourages that. Seemed like a fine decision even in retrospect. So, good hunting - hope your project works!!! -Mike O'Dell Ex-Prisma Chief Computer Scientist All comments are based on experiences at Prisma and have nothing to do with Bellcore. The opinions expressed are solely my own.