Windows Ce For Pandora

[elwing]

Haha, WinCE used as an RTOS. You'd have to be well out of your mind.

sorry, but just no. windows CE can range from the whole blotted phone OS to a tiny headless embedded device, its having still some slight problem as mantionned by darkblu, but it works quite nicely as RTOS...and lots of low cost numerical command use it... I'dd much prefer something else, but for the commercial parts it seems that mantionning "windows" is like a magic word...


edit: hum, by the way I'm not telling that a windows CE for the pandora would be a good thing, in fact I'dd see no interest at all, and addapting TI's DSP + writing the new device driver is not a trivial nor tiny task

 

[zevdawg]

I WinCE'd at that.

I guess that might be good for the "cause you can" factor; but just because you can, doesn't mean you should
Why would ya want the big clusterflock of programming that is Win on the Panda in the first place (DOS aside)?

 

[Tom`]

sorry to hijack, but i find this simply too amusing. so i went on and read the RTOS validation document for CE 6.0 that ms so boldly link to as an official proof of RT-ness.

i'll just quote one paragraph from there:

We detected here the same issue as the one detected when changing the thread round-robin time slice.
A thread yield does not cause a recalculation of the next wakeup time of the thread. So when scheduling
two threads (by each time yielding the processor to the other thread), it can happen that the same thread
awakens twice without the other thread being scheduled first. This happens when the time slice of the
thread that is coming awake has just been finished and as such it is put back on the round-robin FIFO.

excuse me for not elaborating more here, but i'm still laughing my ass off here. oh, ms.

Okay, as a fairly poor CS student, can someone explain just what's so bad about this? Is it the particular bug (which I don't completely understand), the fact that they're using RR scheduling in general, or what? Is it that they're using a FIFO instead of some weighted queue?

I don't totally understand the details of how a RTOS works, so feel free to ignore me if I'm being annoying.

 

[yannv]

The point of a real time system is predictable scheduling. The report excerpt states that although Windows CE offers the round-robin FIFO type, it does not honor it when asked to reschedule. It's a strange corner case, where a thread asking to give time to other threads fails to do so - for the most basic approach possible. Knowing this flaw, you can still use the system in a strict real time function, but it's not a good sign when the easiest case fails.

Explanation of terms: FIFO is first in, first out, the basic type of queue. Round-robin means things operate in turn, so each time a thread has run it moves to the back of the queue, allowing all the others in the same queue to run. Yielding is the act of voluntarily moving to the back of the queue. The failure mode described is thus a process trying to move to the back of the queue only to find itself at the beginning, even though others were waiting. In cooperative multitasking sometimes yielding is the only way to let other threads run.

 

[dnlgreenwood]

screw this how about we al band together and make our ownoperating system... oh wait the openpandora team already did...

I feel like playing SpectreVR for DOS right now, but it makes the cd drive on my laptop too noisy :/

I also have the sudden urge to play dk country, but my netbook with all my games is getting fixed, and those retards at HP are probably going to format my hard disk and reinstall windows. let me see... how long has it been... oh its only been 11 days. just another week or so.

 

[Exophase]

sorry, but just no. windows CE can range from the whole blotted phone OS to a tiny headless embedded device, its having still some slight problem as mantionned by darkblu, but it works quite nicely as RTOS...and lots of low cost numerical command use it... I'dd much prefer something else, but for the commercial parts it seems that mantionning "windows" is like a magic word...

I'm not doing that it CAN, I just wouldn't use it. Gross overkill. Then again, I do a lot of stuff without an OS (or even standard C library often). Sometimes it's a lot more straightforward to deal with hard real time issues this way.