Re:The Mars Helicopter Is Online and Getting Ready to Fly
by KMag on Sunday February 28, 2021 @11:59PM
(#26299888)
I would be interested in seeing what they did to get Linux booting and their userspace daemon running in ~300ms or less. Depending on their non-volatile storage read rate, using an uncompressed kernel might not actually save boot time. I'm guessing they aren't running traditional init or systemd.
I've been told LinuxBIOS is able to get you a text console login prompt faster than hdd platters can spin up, but it takes Ubuntu tens of seconds on my SSD laptop to get me a login prompt.
I'm surprised they don't have an FPGA MEMS autopilot with a simple degree 2 or 3 polynomial model of the flight dynamics , with the CPU and Linux only being involved in making adjustments to the autopilot. Or, maybe that's what they're doing, and by "falling out of the sky" what they really mean is the autopilot drifting.
I've been told LinuxBIOS is able to get you a text console login prompt faster than hdd platters can spin up, but it takes Ubuntu tens of seconds on my SSD laptop to get me a login prompt.
I'm surprised they don't have an FPGA MEMS autopilot with a simple degree 2 or 3 polynomial model of the flight dynamics , with the CPU and Linux only being involved in making adjustments to the autopilot. Or, maybe that's what they're doing, and by "falling out of the sky" what they really mean is the autopilot drifting.