[HN Gopher] Microsoft open-sources ThreadX
___________________________________________________________________
Microsoft open-sources ThreadX
Author : lproven
Score : 246 points
Date : 2023-11-28 12:35 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| delfinom wrote:
| Another piece of software goes to rot under the Eclipse
| Foundation, woo
|
| A foundation so bureaucratic that there is OSS that new people
| can't take over because it requires years of bureaucratic
| process.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| According to the article the software is MIT licenced - one of
| the most permissive licences available. The Eclipse Foundation
| is an unusual choice, but amyone can use/modify or even fork
| this code if they want.
| maccard wrote:
| So what's your alternative? Leave it rot in a filing cupboard
| somewhere?
| nine_k wrote:
| What's the point of "taking over" if you can fork?
|
| How it something OSS if you cannot fork?
| sigzero wrote:
| It isn't going to rot. It's used in a phenomenal amount of
| devices. This is a good thing.
| jzb wrote:
| It will only rot if nobody wants to work on it. If Eclipse is
| horribly bureaucratic, then developers who don't want to
| participate in an Eclipse project may now fork it.
|
| Seems like it's a win-win. If there's a group that can't abide
| whatever constraints exist with Eclipse, then they can fork. If
| not, it's still better off being open than not. I don't really
| see a downside here.
| joezydeco wrote:
| This was "Azure RTOS", bought by Microsoft in haste after Amazon
| acquired FreeRTOS.
|
| Bill Lamie left to start PX5 and work on a new lightweight
| embedded RTOS and took most of the talent with him. If Microsoft
| is doing this, they're pretty much walking away from their
| roadmap for Azure RTOS and IoT nodes along those lines.
|
| I call it a win, ThreadX had a lot more ecosystem behind it than
| FreeRTOS ever did. And it does run on things other than Raspberry
| Pis. Renesas used to give it away for free if you bought their
| SoCs.
| westurner wrote:
| But are there devs for the acquired platform now?
|
| The article says ThreadX used to be what Intel Management
| Engine ME ran on? How do I configure the ME / AMT VNC auth in
| there?
| joezydeco wrote:
| ThreadX has been around for 25 years. You licensed it and put
| it in your embedded system. It's in a _lot_ of products.
| sigzero wrote:
| > It's in a lot of products.
|
| "currently running on over 12 billion devices around the
| world"
| westurner wrote:
| But how many people agreed to sign an NDA in order to
| cluster fuzz such a critical _low-level firmware_ binary
| blob component?
|
| Is this like another baseband processor?
| joezydeco wrote:
| The development of ThreadX has nothing to do with all
| with RPi and VideoCore. It's a software component that
| was used to develop a larger architecture.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Is it like another Intel ME, phone modem firmware, etc?
| Absolutely!
|
| Everything from your x64 CPU to microSD to credit _cards_
| (not the readers; readers run antiquated Android and soon
| known-bad Chromium) runs some form of weird slow
| proprietary RTOS. It is what it is. I bet it takes
| ~century with help of superhuman AI to make those run an
| open and verified code. The situation is improving too,
| slowly, because using buggy proprietary code is not a
| goal, but means.
|
| It's ok to be disgusted about the status quo, but that is
| not necessarily worth your time; IIRC one of original
| complaints by RMS on the state of software freedom that
| lead to Free Software Movement was about some HP printer
| running buggy custom OS. Even the point people said
| enough is enough goes back that far.
| parker_mountain wrote:
| Gosh, there's so much wrong here.
|
| > weird slow proprietary
|
| They're often not weird, a simple single task runner with
| a few libraries to handle common tasks and cryptographic
| operations. Very simple, lightweight, and they generally
| share a common high level architecture (there's not much
| variation in an RTOS)
|
| They're often not slow, they're minimalist OSes - barely
| qualifying as an OS if at all - designed to run a single
| task, with time guarantees, and to get out of the way. In
| fact, if it's a single task you need to run, they're
| faster than any general purpose OS - by design!
|
| They're often not proprietary - a handful of RTOS with
| huge market penetration used in billions of devices (and
| now ThreadX) - are open source and have permissive
| licenses. What IS often proprietary about them are BSPs,
| but that's a whole separate issue. Yes, there are a lot
| of proprietary ones out there, but as a blanket
| statement, it's simply not true.
|
| > readers run antiquated Android
|
| Many use a stripped down version of AOSP, which has
| become a de facto standard BSP, yes. But many, many
| others do not (usually a flavor of embedded linux, or an
| RTOS).
|
| > about some HP printer running buggy custom OS
|
| It was a Xerox printer, and it was because he was
| frustrated from adding existing job management and
| notification features he had written to the new printer.
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| The IME ran on Minix.
|
| https://itsfoss.com/fact-intel-minix-case/
| westurner wrote:
| Intel Management Engine:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine
| uxp8u61q wrote:
| You've got that reversed. IME runs MINIX now, it used to
| run on ThreadX.
| junon wrote:
| TIL Amazon acquired FreeRTOS.
| mort96 wrote:
| Yeah, I had no idea. That's ... worrying.
| joezydeco wrote:
| FreeRTOS isn't a threat.
| cinntaile wrote:
| It's an acquisition from 2017 but do you happen to know why
| Amazon bought FreeRTOS?
| hashtag-til wrote:
| I think it boils down to "because they can".
| kqr2 wrote:
| Amazon missed the boat on mobile phone operating systems.
| They tried to make their own phone but that was a massive
| failure.
|
| By buying FreeRTOS and building up the ecosystem, they were
| hoping to own the OS for IOTs.
| joezydeco wrote:
| My belief is that Amazon sees IoT as a way to further grow
| AWS backend services. All those nodes need a cloud,
| somewhere.
|
| Taking stewardship of FreeRTOS allows them to develop a SDK,
| with or without a hardware kit included, to encourage IoT
| developers to lock into the Amazon ecosystem.
|
| https://docs.aws.amazon.com/freertos/latest/userguide/c-sdk..
| ..
|
| Microsoft saw this chain of events and panicked, buying up
| ThreadX to create Azure RTOS. I believe MS is now abandoning
| this path and focusing on other green fields...the recent
| events with OpenAI being a huge signal.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yeah, it feels like getting rid of it.
|
| I never understood why they got it, when they already had Azure
| Sphere OS.
|
| At least they are open sourcing it, instead of leaving it in
| some digital vault.
| baq wrote:
| > At this point, only the current version is on GitHub, and we
| don't see any trace of a VideoCore version.
|
| :(
|
| (This is the RPi boot blob)
|
| > Now, there is at least some hope that the Raspberry Pi
| Foundation might be able to get permission to release the source
| code for its version.
|
| Indeed that would be something!
| joezydeco wrote:
| I understand the notion here that opening up ThreadX will start
| to allow visibility into VideoCore, since ThreadX runs the
| thing. But an RTOS/scheduler is only a miniscule part of a GPU
| and since Broadcom never opens up anything, I believe it's a
| false hope.
|
| Opening up _any_ GPU code, from _any_ maker, invites patent
| lawsuits from competitors. And then the injunctions start
| flying.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Can confirm: same story for PowerVR. It's a double whammy:
| They want the driver licensing revenue and they are afraid of
| patent trouble.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| I was going to point out that Linux 6.8 seems on target to
| be shipping pretty decent powervr drivers, but yeah,
| probably a huge massive chunk of the magic is in the
| firmware blob, which is closed as heck as usual for this
| industry. Both drivers & boob very recently dropped:
| https://www.phoronix.com/news/PowerVR-Firmware-Blob
|
| I think though they're finally realized trying to charge
| people for drivers has made them a hated name & gotten them
| no where. GMA500 is a long awful wound on everyone & held
| Intel back from being much better at embedded than they
| could have been. Powervr has been one of those living
| embodiments of the phrase "expensive chips without good
| drivers are just expensive sand", or however it goes. So
| now this stuff hypothetically is going to start to be
| broadly usable (only on Linux underimited architrctures I
| guess? Since it's mostly binary blobs?).
| MegaDeKay wrote:
| "Broadcom never opens up anything". True, but from a link in
| the related article from The Guardian [0]
|
| > Broadcom when they developed the original Videocore
| firmware bought a licence for ThreadX from the writer. AIUI,
| a lifetime licence, it never expires. No royalties or
| anything like that. Raspberry Pi have modified that firmware
| many many times over the last 10 years, but no royalties to
| pay. Many years later the writer of ThreadX sold the thing to
| Microsoft.
|
| So sounds like the RPi folks have a free hand over this
| firmware and they might be able to open it now?
|
| [0] https://forums.theregister.com/post/reply/4735439
| joezydeco wrote:
| I believe it's wishful thinking. I wish all you RPi fans
| the best in your endeavor.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > I believe it's wishful thinking.
|
| Why?
| Andrex wrote:
| Maybe a clean room recreation is possible? Or are those
| straws even further out of grasp...
| bri3d wrote:
| Sure, and it's been done:
| https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware - but
| that doesn't involve ThreadX source, just some standard
| reverse engineering work. ThreadX is really the least
| interesting part of this whole operation in terms of the
| Raspberry Pi.
|
| It's very cool that ThreadX has been open sourced as it
| offers an additional battle tested and mature alternative
| to FreeRTOS for new projects. If they're able to get and
| maintain the various safety certifications for ThreadX
| under the Eclipse foundation, this could be game-changing
| in a very different space from the Pi. But in terms of
| reverse engineering or open sourcing the Raspberry Pi
| VideoCore blob, open source ThreadX is pretty much a non-
| event IMO.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| FWIW, the firmware is how they implement DRM for camera and
| codecs.
| bri3d wrote:
| ThreadX is just the scheduler / OS functionality. There are
| tons of other components in the firmware (namely, the parts
| that actually do things) which are still encumbered by
| patent and copyright issues, not to mention the DRM modules
| which are somewhat security-by-obscurity based.
|
| It's one step closer to an open Pi firmware in some ways,
| but probably not a meaningful step.
| numpad0 wrote:
| The one put under an open license is just one of numerous
| forks. The code on RasPi is a different fork modified
| downstream.
| jylam wrote:
| Having worked (very) closely on GPU firmwares and drivers, I
| always find it funny that it is still something so closely
| guarded and protected. Honestly there isn't much to it.
| That's fairly regular code, not like futuristic algorithms.
| You won't find any novel rasterizing code or ways to order
| your commands or whatever, 99% of the interesting work is
| done by the GPU. You'll find basic or vaguely clever code to
| order lists and optimize the order of the commands, but
| that's it.
|
| I'm 95% sure that if AMD released their firmware and/or their
| drivers source code, NVidia wouldn't learn anything of value,
| they wrote the same stuff anyway. That's just sad \o/
| gary_0 wrote:
| This is really just the modern patent regime at work, isn't
| it? Any random problem a chip company SE or EE can solve in
| an afternoon can get that solution whisked past an
| overworked patent examiner. Now open-sourcing your basic
| code to "optimize the order of the commands" opens your
| company up to a hojillion-dollar lawsuit from a patent
| troll or any competitor that feels like going nuclear.
| Maybe the patent is BS but it'll take a multi-million-
| dollar lawsuit to prove it.
|
| It might not even be realistic that some jerk is going to
| search through 10 million lines of driver code looking for
| patent violations, but these are corporations we're talking
| about. They're twitchy when it comes to risk. So the source
| of insanity here is the broken patent system, isn't it? (I
| agree that while you get to write vaguely clever code, even
| specialized software dev is 99% perspiration.)
| leoedin wrote:
| The safety certifications are particularly interesting. It's a
| lot of work to develop "safe software" - that is software that is
| developed according to a safety standard and certified to a
| "safety integrity level". Having an RTOS which is both open
| source and safety certified is pretty great.
|
| They say they want to maintain the certifications - that will be
| tricky unless there's some investment coming from somewhere. It's
| a lot of fairly bureaucratic work to understand the safety
| standards, put the right development processes in place and
| maintain those as your software changes. It's not nearly as
| simple as just writing code and running it. It's definitely not
| the kind of software development someone would do as a hobby. I
| hope Microsoft are going to fund some of that development effort.
|
| Interestingly although FreeRTOS isn't safety certified, SAFERTOS
| (https://www.highintegritysystems.com/safertos/) is - which is a
| commercial implementation with the same APIs.
| MegaDeKay wrote:
| Yes, that ongoing certification will be costly but they mention
| the support of companies with pretty deep pockets: "In addition
| to the project, we are also announcing the creation of an
| interest group focused on developing an industry-supported,
| sustainable funding model for ThreadX. We are excited that AMD,
| Cypherbridge, Microsoft, NXP, PX5, Renesas, ST
| Microelectronics, Silicon Labs, and Witekio (an Avnet company)
| have all committed to supporting this conversation"
| demondemidi wrote:
| This is huge. Automakers won't touch something unless it is iso
| 26262, and it commands a 10x premium. It is very hard to
| functional safety right, and this compliance is a key component
| in enabling tier 2 manufacturers.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| I'll say. EN 50128 is the first box I need to check as someone
| who leads railway software projects. This immediately caught my
| eye as a result.
| roland35 wrote:
| SafeRTOS is a complete rewrite of FreeRTOS, it's more or less
| API compatible. The cost is all in the certificate!
| zwieback wrote:
| It's a fine RTOS, at least it was when I was working on Deskjet
| firmware. At the time the open source OSes and especially the
| tooling really wasn't up to the task. Things really have changed
| though, now there are alternatives.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| The progress the embedded world has made on FOSS has been
| incredible. I started in like 2016 or 2017(ignoring the ~8
| years I played with Arduino).
|
| At the end of the day, I end up often using microchip studio
| because that is my board and it just works nicely. However, I
| have tons of tiny personal projects I'll spin up with vscode
| and platformIO and knock stuff out. Heck, even when I was
| merely playing around with it, I was able to FOSS my way to
| building and sending everything with various software.
|
| I cannot imagine embedded pre ardunio. You'd think it would
| have created a scarcity of workers.
| HankB99 wrote:
| > I cannot imagine embedded pre ardunio. You'd think it would
| have created a scarcity of workers.
|
| That made it a useful market to be in (as a developer.) My
| first embedded task was on a PDP 11/23 sans OS (despite the
| fact that DEC had suitable RTOSs like RSX-11M)
| linuxdude314 wrote:
| It's not that hard, 2nd year EE classes at most. Once you
| learn how to read a data sheet for your MCU or SOC things
| start to click.
| zwieback wrote:
| ...and when you find yourself reading the errata sheet
| for your specific silicon revision you've arrived.
| amluto wrote:
| One of my first projects was an embedded thing, long before
| 2016, where the number of deployments was exactly one. (It
| was a ruggedized device embedded into an experiment that we
| literally dropped from an eight story building twice a day.
| The device in question did just fine, although,
| unsurprisingly, a bunch of the rest of the apparatus needed
| rather regular repairs.)
|
| The development experience was _miserable_. The embedded code
| was in C, and, when something went wrong, there was about a
| 50% chance that the bug was in the proprietary compiler from
| the vendor and not in the C code at all.
|
| There was probably some way to debug the live system, but I
| never found it. I'm not sure where was any way to simulate
| the system well enough to run our code short of actually
| uploading it to the device.
|
| The world has come a long way :). An RPi or Arduino or
| anything else along those lines would likely also survive the
| treatment we gave this thing as long as all the connectors
| were very well secured.
| bfrog wrote:
| It'll be really interesting to see how this shakes out in terms
| of other open rtos projects given a safety certified RTOS is now
| available under a nice license with wide architecture support.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| For those wondering why Azure has an RTOS, Microsoft bought
| Express Logic and their ThreadX RTOS in 2019. ThreadX is in use
| on a large number of resource constrained microcontrollers.
|
| The Azure branding makes little sense, beyond maybe that IoT
| things communicate with the cloud or something.
| rickette wrote:
| The branding is probably also due to AWS having FreeRTOS
| https://aws.amazon.com/freertos/
| roland35 wrote:
| I believe Microsoft bought threadx in the height of the IoT
| hype cycle!
| jnwatson wrote:
| Purchase price isn't public, but founders/owners did well.
|
| They already started up a competitor.
| paddy_m wrote:
| It took a lot of reading of that blogpost before I realized that
| it was about an operating system. I seriously thought it was
| about some parallel threading standard. Especially for a broad
| announcement like that, they should give readers some more
| context.
| sigzero wrote:
| What? It's in the first paragraph of the linked announcement.
| Unless you didn't know what RTOS was an acronym for but that is
| a simple google request.
| dylan604 wrote:
| It's also accepted publishing standards to expand an acronym
| the first time it is used. Of course, kids today don't know
| what standards are because a boomer made them or some such
| nonsense excuse for just I do what I want
| stonogo wrote:
| The first two uses of the term are part of product names,
| not uses of the term itself. They almost immediately
| explain the acronym in the next paragraph, and give alert
| readers a tremendous hint in the very first sentence. I
| think they did a perfectly acceptable job of providing
| context here.
|
| This publication was literally founded by a boomer, so I
| don't think your conclusory whining is particularly well-
| targeted.
| uxp8u61q wrote:
| If you don't know what an RTOS is, then what makes you think
| you're in the target audience for this article?
| synergy20 wrote:
| how does threadx compare to zephyr,now both fully open
| sourced,one under eclipse another under Linux foundation
| bfrog wrote:
| Zephyr is a lot more complicated than ThreadX and has been
| trying to get safety certified for many years now. It does have
| a really nice testing and board package story though, along
| with many other features ThreadX doesn't have.
|
| Like running a sample on a supported board with Zephyr is
| pretty trivial. With ThreadX it seems to be included in the
| vendor sdk much like freertos might be. Some pros and cons to
| each certainly.
| naasking wrote:
| Any experience with Riot OS?
|
| https://www.riot-os.org/
| pantalaimon wrote:
| It's pretty easy and convenient to get running, but it's
| mostly written by students - so core components are left
| unmaintained once their authors graduate to other things.
| wiz21c wrote:
| Is it me or certification is a very powerful way to keep control
| on the open sourced code ? I mean it's open so you can modify it
| but as soon as you touch one line, you can't claim the
| certification anymore... Therefore only MSFT has the ability to
| change the code (because I suppose they don't have to re-do the
| whole certification); until another big player gets the
| certification.
|
| Right ?
| krylon wrote:
| My understanding is you need to re-certify in some form upon
| changing _anything_ about the code. I 'm not sure if it's the
| same process each time or if you can do some kind of
| incremental re-certification for minor updates.
|
| Either way, Microsoft can _afford to_ do that if they want to.
| But I would (naively) expect the rules to apply to anyone who
| wants to modify the code base, I don 't think Microsoft has any
| privileged position when it comes to that.
| j16sdiz wrote:
| Microsoft have access to the material they used in previous
| certification, this may make the process a lot cheaper.
| eschneider wrote:
| Not really. It's pretty rare to use an RTOS without making
| _some_ modifications and it's intertwined with your application
| anyways. If you need certification, you're going to have to get
| it for the combined app/RTOS/RTOS-modifications anyways. And
| you're in better shape starting from a base that you know
| passes certification.
| demondemidi wrote:
| Yes! There are some industries that will not tolerate seat-of-
| the-pants development. Functional safety requirements make a
| nice tall fence to keep out risky developers. Which is why
| china automakers have no such regulations.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Sorry to burst your bubble, but FuSa dev teams are often full
| of "risky developers" who frankly shouldn't be within mile of
| any codebase your life depends on. You can only hope the
| safety culture and tooling keeps them in check.
|
| There's genuinely good parts of the standards, but a lot of
| the rituals are just checklist items to assure certification
| authorities you have a defined process similar to what
| they've seen before, regardless of whether that's actually
| effective at issue reduction/detection. In many cases,
| they're actually counterproductive and encourage people to
| focus on minute, obscure error sources rather than addressing
| significantly more common issues like memory safety and
| undefined behavior.
| demondemidi wrote:
| Thanks for your insight! As someone who has lead FuSa
| certification on multiple automotive products, I can't
| disagree with you more. But maybe you just had a bad
| experience.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| I've also led the process at multiple companies. It's a
| big enough space that there's definitely room for
| different experiences, even within the same companies.
|
| That said, I'm surprised you've never encountered issues
| with people e.g. not understanding how serious UB is vs
| other types of issues in C-family languages. That's
| fairly universal even among developers from what I've
| seen.
| demondemidi wrote:
| I think you might be confusing software standards with
| functional safety standards. They are related, but one is
| required by the other. FuSa from my role has been
| predominantly architecture and process. Developers do
| need to follow coding and documentation guidelines. If
| they are fighting that then there are bigger problems
| with leadership.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Therefore only MSFT has the ability to change the code
| (because I suppose they don't have to re-do the whole
| certification);
|
| This is incorrect. Microsoft does not have free license to
| change the code and retain certification.
|
| The certification is handled by a separate entity. The
| certification rules apply to contributions from everyone,
| including Microsoft.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| > used in Raspberry Pis
|
| Raspberry Pi is probably one of the less notable users.
| joezydeco wrote:
| But it makes RPi fans perk up their ears because it's part of
| the GPU blob that they still haven't been able to reverse-
| engineer.
|
| This news about Azure RTOS has been posted to HN a few times
| over the last week or so, even once by me, but I didn't realize
| you had to put "Raspberry Pi" in the headline to get traction.
| lproven wrote:
| Article author/submitter here.
|
| > I didn't realize you had to put "Raspberry Pi" in the
| headline to get traction.
|
| Yes, this was my theory. I was guessing most people hadn't
| heard of ThreadX and didn't know what it was or that it was
| used in devices they already owned. That is the sort of info
| that gets stuff read and shared.
| joezydeco wrote:
| Mods just yanked "Raspberry Pi" from the headline.
| Interesting.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| Quote: " Now, there is at least some hope that the Raspberry Pi
| Foundation might be able to get permission to release the source
| code for its version"
|
| This is something that always irked me about RPi's. How the fuck,
| you, the hardware vendor, that's suppose to know the inner guts
| of your product, do not have full production for its software?
| That you need it to rely on undisclosed 3rd party blobs!! Yes,
| yes, I know about the politics and the business logic that led to
| this situation but that was at beginning, when money were need
| it. Nowadays they are in a good place in that regard, might wanna
| pivot so they fully control everything, but I guess once you go
| with a bad design, the complacent around that just grows.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| They're the vendor, not the manufacturer. Dell don't release
| all the source code for the components they construct their
| devices from.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Getting downvoted because nobody took the time to read your
| post, I assume. RPi foundation could probably have their own
| SoC made at this point, and (finally) having fully open
| firmware would be a huge selling point and maybe help stave off
| the clones. So why don't they do that?
| surajrmal wrote:
| They almost certainly cannot afford to do that at the prices
| they are selling these things for. I'm also not entirely
| certain a large enough fraction of their customer base cares
| enough for them to take action here. They are likely doing
| the practical thing that makes the most sense.
| Andrex wrote:
| The RPi 5 has custom silicon.
|
| Custom silicon is hard and few would accept significant a
| step down in raw power compared to the previous generation
| while the transition occurs.
| lproven wrote:
| [Article author/submitter here]
|
| > RPi foundation could probably have their own SoC made at
| this point
|
| "Could have"? The RP2040 chip in the Pi Pico is their own
| silicon. The RP1 "south bridge" chip in the new Pi 5 is also
| their own silicon.
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/21/pi_pico/
|
| This is nothing new. They've been doing it since 2016-2018.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Designing / building an entire modern(ish) SoC is an order of
| magnitude different than building a microcontroller (or even
| something as ambitious as RP1)--I don't think it's impossible
| for Raspberry Pi someday, but certainly not at their current
| size / staffing!
| techn00 wrote:
| Repo: https://github.com/azure-rtos/threadx
| InitEnabler wrote:
| License looked alright, until I came across this:
| https://github.com/azure-rtos/threadx/blob/a8e5d0946c31385ff...
| wakamoleguy wrote:
| The announcement says it will be made available under the MIT
| license, so I would expect the repo to be updated at some
| point.
| freedomben wrote:
| This is indeed a major deal, and having the Eclipse Foundation
| shepherd it is wonderful.
|
| Microsoft deserves praise and even adulation for this, but time
| will tell how well supported the project is. They have a good
| track record so I'm very optimistic, but this is going to require
| a lot of ongoing support. That shouldn't be and isn't on
| Microsoft alone now, but they may have to shoulder a larger
| burden while getting things moving.
| LispSporks22 wrote:
| Are they dumping it on Eclipse and waving bye-bye or are they
| sticking around to develop it further?
|
| Many projects seem to be ditched by corporations and kind of
| orphaned in Eclipse and Apache
| refulgentis wrote:
| Yeah...I'd love a blow by blow on Eclipse, my (joking)
| understanding prior to this article was it was an IDE open
| source project that grew so unwieldly/abandoned that some
| combo of JetBrains & Google was able to co-opt it and end up
| owning it entirely.
| denysvitali wrote:
| There are some cheap chinese cameras built on top of that OS,
| this might be interesting
| davmar wrote:
| "Every once in a while, a new open source initiative comes along
| which is truly an industry changing event" - the article
|
| "Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that
| changes everything" - steve jobs announcing the iPhone in 2007
| wslh wrote:
| How QNX plays in all this picture/benchmark? [1] I understand
| this is a different RTOS but do we expect Microsoft to open
| source QNX as well or because it was the cash cow of the sector
| they will wait? QNX has several licensing options.
|
| [1] https://blackberry.qnx.com/en
| joezydeco wrote:
| QNX is a Blackberry product, not Microsoft.
| wslh wrote:
| Thank you, my fault. Nokia was acquired by Microsoft.
| Microsoft and Blackberry had a partnership only [1].
|
| [1] https://www.investopedia.com/news/blackberry-shares-jump-
| mic...
| ryandrake wrote:
| Wow, ThreadX. To quote Obi-wan, "That's a name I've not heard in
| a long time". I last worked on a ThreadX based product about 20
| years ago. It was annoying because our application device did not
| require Real Time scheduling, or a particularly fast boot, but
| the decision to go with ThreadX rather than, say, embedded Linux
| was made way over my Junior head. We even had a separate "higher
| end" product that ran embedded Linux, which was a joy to work
| with, so it's not like we didn't think Linux would work.
| Everything we ended up doing on that product took 2X to 3X as
| long to develop, debug, and test because a lot of the niceties
| that you come to rely on from a kernel simply didn't exist with
| ThreadX.
|
| It's really something I would only use for an extremely simple
| safety-critical device, one that absolutely needed Real Time.
| penguin_booze wrote:
| I've come to associate Eclipse (and Apache) with Java. Given that
| this is an RTOS for microcontrollers, is this written in Java?
|
| > A corresponding open source project has not yet been created
| Matthias247 wrote:
| Eclipse and Apache are foundations. And while those foundations
| host a set of Java projects, they are not limited to it.
| mikehollinger wrote:
| I really liked ThreadX when I was working with it a while ago.
| Calling it an "operating system" is charitable in the sense that
| it's an interrupt service routine and a bunch of functions to
| handle 'creating threads' and managing memory allocations.
|
| It was super light weight and quite nice to get stuff done. You
| call tx_thread_create or some such and then tx_malloc and so on
| and then they have tx queues and semaphores and mutexes and so
| on.
|
| Neat to see it's still living on.
|
| In our case we were doing real-time power/fan/thermal control
| loops so we needed control over when certain actions were
| happening and needed to be able to guarantee that we could sense
| a problem and then (within X ticks) issue commands to respond, or
| make the system safe to prevent damage.
| uxp8u61q wrote:
| > I really liked ThreadX when I was working with it a while
| ago. Calling it an "operating system" is charitable in the
| sense that it's an interrupt service routine and a bunch of
| functions to handle 'creating threads' and managing memory
| allocations.
|
| Yes, that's called an RTOS.
| josemanuel wrote:
| I thought Microsoft bought the threadX company very recently.
| Interesting change of strategy?
| andrewstuart wrote:
| "Open sourcing" as in dumping the project and hoping to avoid
| community anger?
|
| Or "open sourcing" with money and commitment and developers
| behind it?
| gte525u wrote:
| uCOS-II and uCOS-III were open sourced a while ago as well
| https://github.com/weston-embedded
| dang wrote:
| Related: https://eclipse-foundation.blog/2023/11/21/introducing-
| eclip...
|
| (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38445039, but we merged
| that thread hither)
| greggsy wrote:
| > [ThreadX firmware binary] runs on the Pi's VideoCore GPU. This
| is the primary device, the part that boots up the Pi and controls
| its hardware: the Arm cores are slave devices to the VideoCore
| GPU.
|
| Very interesting factoid - I had no idea.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| How long before I can play Doom on it?
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