Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!cronkite!newstop!sun!amdcad!sono!miklg
From: miklg@sono.uucp (Michael Goldman )
Newsgroups: comp.realtime
Subject: Re: Experiences with LynxOS?
Message-ID: <1991Jun20.164032.4025@sono.uucp>
Date: 20 Jun 91 16:40:32 GMT
References: <1991Jun20.003430.760@flood.com>
Organization: Acuson; Mountain View, California
Lines: 35

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