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Microsoft open-sources ThreadX

theregister.com

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Re: Microsoft open-sources ThreadX

#91

Post by jylam »

joezydeco wrote: post #9
baq wrote: post #7

> 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!

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.

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/

Re: Microsoft open-sources ThreadX

#92

Post by AlotOfReading »

demondemidi wrote: post #54
AlotOfReading wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 be…

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.

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.

Re: Microsoft open-sources ThreadX

#93

Post by jnwatson »

roland35 wrote: post #90
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!

Purchase price isn't public, but founders/owners did well.

They already started up a competitor.

Re: Microsoft open-sources ThreadX

#94

Post by refulgentis »

LispSporks22 wrote: post #81
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

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.

Re: Microsoft open-sources ThreadX

#95

Post by mikehollinger »

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.

Re: Microsoft open-sources ThreadX

#97

Post by uxp8u61q »

mikehollinger wrote: post #95

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…

> 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.

Re: Microsoft open-sources ThreadX

#98

Post by geerlingguy »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #51
unnouinceput wrote: post #40

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 a…

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?

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!
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