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Microsoft open-sources ThreadX

theregister.com

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Re: Microsoft open-sources ThreadX

#81

Post by LispSporks22 »

freedomben wrote: post #64

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 t…

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

Re: Microsoft open-sources ThreadX

#83

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

leoedin wrote: post #8

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.…

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.

Re: Microsoft open-sources ThreadX

#84

Post by linuxdude314 »

HankB99 wrote: post #39
hospitalJail wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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)

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.

Re: Microsoft open-sources ThreadX

#85

Post by ryandrake »

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.

Re: Microsoft open-sources ThreadX

#87

Post by Matthias247 »

penguin_booze wrote: post #86

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

Eclipse and Apache are foundations. And while those foundations host a set of Java projects, they are not limited to it.

Re: Microsoft open-sources ThreadX

#88

Post by roland35 »

leoedin wrote: post #8

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.…

SafeRTOS is a complete rewrite of FreeRTOS, it's more or less API compatible. The cost is all in the certificate!

Re: Microsoft open-sources ThreadX

#89

Post by zwieback »

linuxdude314 wrote: post #84
HankB99 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

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.

...and when you find yourself reading the errata sheet for your specific silicon revision you've arrived.

Re: Microsoft open-sources ThreadX

#90

Post by roland35 »

llm_nerd wrote: post #14

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.

I believe Microsoft bought threadx in the height of the IoT hype cycle!
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