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A comment on What computer and software is used by the Falcon 9? (2015). Parent comment

Re:What computer and software is used by the Falcon 9? (2015) by raverbashing on Sunday May 31, 2020 @06:53AM (#23368669)
I don't see why.

Chromium is being used in the UI. Not on critical flight software.

> maybe even manual docking

It isn't done manually

> C++ and linux do not strike me as mission critical piece of software / language either

A lot of flight software is done on C++, as you even mentioned. In the end, your best reliability partner is not using a language that's only know by fewer people.

What would be a good "mission critical piece of software"? QNX (with no memory protection?). Linux is fine. I suppose they're not firing Ubuntu out of the box and running that with no customizations.

Separation of concerns and redundancy usually beat correctness on the long term (which doesn't mean they didn't test the correctness of the system).

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Re:What computer and software is used by the Falcon 9? (2015) by StillBored on Monday June 01, 2020 @09:35AM (#23378239) 

  QNX (with no memory protection?)
Its probably a misunderstanding, but QNX has a very strong memory protection model that extends to its driver stack. Given that its a true realtime/microkernel, which has its own set of problems, but memory protection isn't one of them. For a number of cases QNX is going to be a large step up from linux.

http://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/6.5.0/topic/com.qnx.doc.i...

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