Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2007 19:39:30 -0700 From: Modulok <modulok@gmail.com> To: kzabbo@bellsouth.net Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD and Robotics Message-ID: <64c038660706171939s6651c3a0vd0e52b2e25c5069d@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <20070617222805.TPDE28395.ibm60aec.bellsouth.net@mail.bellsouth.net> References: <20070617222805.TPDE28395.ibm60aec.bellsouth.net@mail.bellsouth.net>
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It's only as good as the drivers you write to control the robot. It also depends on just how critical your "critical situations" refers to. In situations where human life is directly dependent upon the integrity of the system, a modular kernel design has traditionally been preferred over the monolithic kernel designs found in Windows, Linux, BSD. That isn't to say that FreeBSD is unstable, in fact it's very stable. However, in a situation where people die if the system fails, there are some questions as to the safety of the underlying designs of these kernels. The reason for this is, (in general), device drivers operate in the kernel's memory space and therefore have the potential to bring down the rest of the system, should they fail, (again, in general). In a modular kernel design, where everything is run in user-space, if a single driver goes berserk it is entirely insulated from the rest of the system. Then there are embedded systems, which are regarded as more stable because the hardware they run on is identical from one system to the next and never changes. Contrast this to operating systems that must run on a wide range of consumer hardware; there is a statistically higher probability of mistakes, just due to the increased size of the codebase. (In practice this doesn't always work out though, as I've used some embedded systems that were embarrassingly unstable). The smaller codebase of embedded systems and modular kernels is typically easier to audit, as there is far less code. Where human life is directly dependent, the code must be audited by a third party. For pretty much any other "critical application", FreeBSD Release has been quite stable in my experience. Strip the kernel of everything you don't need, write good drivers and run it all on stable hardware and you should be fine in most situations. You'll probably go years between reboots. Just my 2 cents. -Modulok- On 6/17/07, kzabbo@bellsouth.net <kzabbo@bellsouth.net> wrote: > I've read some really good things about FreeBSD, especially its virus > resistance and reliability. > > Will FreeBSD work on a robot that has to be trusted in critical situations? > > Kevin > > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe@freebsd.org" >
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