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Date:      Fri, 6 Apr 2001 08:02:09 -0400 (EDT)
From:      Daniel Eischen <eischen@vigrid.com>
To:        Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.ORG>
Cc:        Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>, John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.ORG>, Johann Visagie <johann@egenetics.com>, Freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG, Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@ofug.org>
Subject:   Re: corporate announcement
Message-ID:  <Pine.SUN.3.91.1010406075759.3756A-100000@pcnet1.pcnet.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1010406012504.46990H-100000@fledge.watson.org>

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On Fri, 6 Apr 2001, Robert Watson wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 5 Apr 2001, Brett Glass wrote:
> 
> > At 11:45 AM 4/5/2001, John Baldwin wrote:
> > 
> > >The pathfinder ran on a version of VxWorks.  
> > 
> > Yes. Though it was reported at the time that the system was unstable and
> > had to be rebooted by a watchdog timer at regular intervals. 
> > Fortunately, the embedded system designers who created the probe were
> > smart enough to build one in. 
> 
> My understanding is that that was a result of an application bug rather
> than the OS, and had to do with a priority inversion.  However, the
> article I read is pretty distant in my memory, so some references would no
> doubt be useful. 

Yes, it was an application bug.  It failed to use an priority inheritence
mutex (in VxWorks speak, an inversion safe semaphore).  See:

  http://www.cs.cornell.edu/cs614-sp98/papers/pathfinder.html

-- 
Dan Eischen

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