Timeline for Identifying late 1990s embedded 486 UNIX-like system
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
15 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 15, 2020 at 14:43 | comment | added | Vatine | Once upon a time, there was a Swedish company called DIAB, who got tired of writing custom OSes for industrial control and decided that the next thing would be a general OS, for industrial control. Starting from a System III source-code license, they wrote D-NIX, a unix-like operating system with real-time scheduling extensions, as well as asymmetric multi-processor support. These days, the only remnant part is their internal compiler division, owned by (IIRC) Wind River Systems. | |
| Jun 15, 2020 at 14:34 | comment | added | Wayne Conrad | Way back when, working on an embedded system, I wrote an OS in 8086 assembly. It handled radio communications using a homegrown protocol, dynamic memory management, digital and analog I/O, and it had a bytecode interpter. I also wrote the compiler, in C, that turned a DSL into bytecodes to run on the embedded system. It wasn't as big a task as a modern OS because the requirements were very specific. I only had to support just what the system needed, no more, no less. | |
| Jun 15, 2020 at 13:41 | vote | accept | jpa | ||
| Jun 15, 2020 at 9:40 | comment | added | Luaan |
@jpa When I worked on my first OS, I used file formats that could be easily edited in development (MS-DOS at the time). This included compatible (bare) executables, for a while. But the r3interp match is more likely accidental (it doesn't match the actual file format, as far as I can tell). Having rooted file system wasn't specific to Unix either. Rooted FSs were common with hard-drives, drive letters are much more convenient for floppy-based OSes, like the original MS-DOS. There's a 486 CPU in the controller, so x86 exceptions are to be expected. Probably OS from ~scratch.
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| Jun 15, 2020 at 7:10 | comment | added | jpa | @slebetman Yeah, for very low-level stuff. But this seems to have a lot of the standard POSIX APIs or at least similar available, and the realtime stuff is dedicated to another processor running some kind of different system. But I guess they've imitated BSD just for familiarity. | |
| Jun 15, 2020 at 6:30 | comment | added | slebetman | @jpa Not at all. For robotics and industrial equipment it is in fact very common to write the entire operating system from scratch. The only reason you'd use an existing operating system is if you need TCP/IP networking and can't find a good library or save files on standard filesystems like NTFS or EXT3 and can't find a good libraryor need a GUI and can't find a good library because they require writing complicated drivers . If you're doing none of the above it's easier to manage your processes directly by using timer interrupts in your own code | |
| Jun 14, 2020 at 20:00 | comment | added | Jörg W Mittag | … this OS has 1 well-defined hardware platform, 1 well-defined workload, and 0 users. | |
| Jun 14, 2020 at 19:59 | comment | added | Jörg W Mittag | I think we often overestimate the effort it takes to design a programming language, or implement a compiler or operating system. Yes, implementing an operating system that can reliably run on millions of possible combinations of CPUs, busses, graphics cards, storage controllers, network cards, can scale from watches to 10000 CPU supercomputers, can support batch, interactive, transactional, and realtime workloads, support I/O-bound and CPU-bound workloads, steady and highly volatile workloads, and be easy to use for novices while being powerful for experts is hard. But this is not such an OS. | |
| Jun 14, 2020 at 15:20 | comment | added | jpa | Yeah, I guess you are right. Nowadays it would be weird for any company to spend so much time reinventing the basic operating system, but things were different back in 1990s. And after all they did make up a custom programming language. | |
| Jun 14, 2020 at 14:51 | history | edited | John Dallman | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Conclusion.
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| Jun 14, 2020 at 14:44 | history | edited | John Dallman | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Conclusion.
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| Jun 14, 2020 at 14:34 | history | edited | John Dallman | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Development tools, updating the OS, the controller.
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| Jun 14, 2020 at 14:29 | history | edited | John Dallman | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Development tools
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| Jun 14, 2020 at 14:19 | history | edited | John Dallman | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Add language manual
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| Jun 14, 2020 at 14:12 | history | answered | John Dallman | CC BY-SA 4.0 |