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A comment on The second operating system hiding in every mobile phone. Parent comment

Re:The second operating system hiding in every mobile phone by frozenport on Wednesday November 13, 2013 @01:21AM (#6723689)
These already exist, for example it is very difficult to build biomedical software that gets hooked up into a living thing - even if you use it only for research. In practice such a hard realtime guarantee can only be met by a devices like an FPGA. All of this is in a code.

Real issue here is why such codes don't exist for for this particular problem.

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Re:The second operating system hiding in every mobile phone by gngeal on Wednesday November 13, 2013 @07:50AM (#6724846)
In practice such a hard realtime guarantee can only be met by a devices like an FPGA.

There have always been fully deterministic CPUs around for that purpose. The simpler the system, the better; just hook a Forth chip to a memory without caches and you're set.

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Re:The second operating system hiding in every mobile phone by doelie_ on Wednesday November 13, 2013 @10:40AM (#6725858)
Do you have any experience with Forth chips? I've been looking for an excuse to play with the GreenArray devices.
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Re:The second operating system hiding in every mobile phone by gngeal on Wednesday November 13, 2013 @10:56AM (#6725985)
No, but I don't see any flaw in that design. Indeed, it seems like the case of Hoare's "obviously no deficiencies" in a system design.

I believe that the GreenArrays people, setting aside the $450 dev board, also had some notes on making cheap breadboards with their chips or something like that. I don't have a link handy, though. ;/

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Re:The second operating system hiding in every mobile phone by ballard on Wednesday November 13, 2013 @03:34PM (#6728266)
Could try calling their sales folks and see if a rep will just sample it.
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Re:The second operating system hiding in every mobile phone by informatimago on Wednesday November 13, 2013 @06:29AM (#6724516)
You can code bugs and security failures into a FPGA as well as in software.
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Re:The second operating system hiding in every mobile phone by klez on Wednesday November 13, 2013 @07:50AM (#6724843)
Yes, but you depend less on bugs caused by levels of abstraction below your code, such as runtimes, OSes etc.
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Re:The second operating system hiding in every mobile phone by bri3d on Wednesday November 13, 2013 @03:46PM (#6728356)
Between writing and formally verifying HDL, logic synthesis (often using third-party or vendor-provided blocks or soft IP, mind you), behavioral and logic simulation (software!), layout, MDP, and building test harnesses that actually test the final hardware, I would actually trust a lower-level language compiled using a well-known compiler and running on a small RTOS on a proven CPU more than I'd trust a new design synthesized into FPGA or especially ASIC form.
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Re:The second operating system hiding in every mobile phone by nilliams on Wednesday November 13, 2013 @09:59AM (#6725510)
Only a win if you have some reason to believe your code will be any less buggy when you inevitably start on your own ad-hoc reimplementations of those abstractions.
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