Glass panels: what OS?

Bruce Horn wrote:

What underlying OS do the various glass panels (Avidyne, Garmin, etc.)
use? It might actually make me think twice about buying a particular
system if I knew that (for example) it was Windows underneath.

Avidyne uses WinNT in their Units, I've flown with the EX500 and the

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Bruce Horn wrote:

What underlying OS do the various glass panels (Avidyne, Garmin, etc.)
use? It might actually make me think twice about buying a particular
system if I knew that (for example) it was Windows underneath.

I've flown with an Avidyne Flightmax for a couple of months, before we
upgraded to the EX550. It ran WinNT (3.51 IIRC) on a PIII. It froze
every week or so during normal use and I got the Blue Screen of Death a
couple of times. Wasn't very reliable... I think we went through three
replacement units (All on warranty) before we finally got the 550.

The EX550 is a lot better, only freezing twice so far while acessing
airborne radar, according to Avidyne a problem with the Radar Interface.
I don't know if the 550 is still running WinNT as the boot screen no
longer shows any information about the underlying OS. The current one is
the second Unit though...

Cheers,
Jens

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I have, however, seen the OS crash on Garmin handheld
GPS units. Frequently.

I have a Garmin V mounted in my car. By now I can program anything in
there without looking and use it to drive to my nextdoor neighbor
(LA Story reference there ). anyway, yes, they do lock up but
not too frequently. In some regards they are more complicated.....it
calculates routes automatically while the Garmin aviation units only
have to calculate direct routing for the most part.

To be honest, I would prefer the more stable Windows OS.

I don't.

All operating systems have a long history of crashing and being less than
stable.

I thought Linux rarely ever crashes but that is only what I've heard.
My company has part of it hardware running off of WX Works. That has
120 motors to control in real time with motor encoders plus
mechanoelectrical secondary feedback to compare the motor counts to,
assert interlocks when any of those are not within tolerances plus
much more and I've never heard of one crashing. I have heard of
the Windows XX boxes they are connected to crashing a lot more often
and they more or less doing a LOT less work. But every application
is different.

It would be interesting to know why you think Win NT would be
unstable on something like the MX-20. The device is dedicated to running one
program. It has no peripherals. It never runs for more than a few hours.
Basically, all the issues supposedly making Win NT unstable simply do not
exist on a closed box like this.

And you never have to do processor intensive calculations like bold
facing a word.

Gerald

"Gerald Sylvester" wrote in message
.net...

I have, however, seen the OS crash on Garmin handheld
GPS units. Frequently.

I have a Garmin V mounted in my car. By now I can program anything in
there without looking and use it to drive to my nextdoor neighbor
(LA Story reference there ). anyway, yes, they do lock up but
not too frequently. In some regards they are more complicated.....it
calculates routes automatically while the Garmin aviation units only
have to calculate direct routing for the most part.

To be honest, I would prefer the more stable Windows OS.

I don't.

All operating systems have a long history of crashing and being less
than
stable.

I thought Linux rarely ever crashes but that is only what I've heard.

Actually, I have a Red Hat Linux server. In the six months that I have owned
it, it has crashed four times and had to be restarted. OTOH, the Windows XP
Professional computers have not crashed even once during that time.

I hear a lot about Windows' instability. I say it is crap. All I can go on
is my own personal experience, but MS operating systems are the only ones
that I have ever used that can go for more than a few weeks without
crashing. What am I supposed to do? Believe my own experience, or believe a
bunch of anti-social geeks who begin frothing at the mouth and chewing the
carpet at the mere mention of Microsoft or Bill Gates?

In article , C J Campbell wrote:
The MX-20 runs plain vanilla Windows NT 4.0. I don't know why anyone except
software bigots would have a problem with that. There have been no known
problems with the OS in this application.

Except even Microsoft recommends you don't use their software in safety
critical devices. If you've ever been exposed to the gory details of the
Windows API you'd agree with them.

--
Dylan Smith, Castletown, Isle of Man
Flying: http://www.dylansmith.net
Frontier Elite Universe: http://www.alioth.net
"Maintain thine airspeed, lest the ground come up and smite thee"

In article , C J Campbell wrote:
Actually, I have a Red Hat Linux server. In the six months that I have owned
it, it has crashed four times and had to be restarted. OTOH, the Windows XP
Professional computers have not crashed even once during that time.

I hear a lot about Windows' instability. I say it is crap. All I can go on
is my own personal experience, but MS operating systems are the only ones
that I have ever used that can go for more than a few weeks...

I agree with you on the stability issue; I did a lot of hard-core
development on WinNT 4.0, and my development system didn't need reboots
(there were issues with NT memory leaks which did force me to eventually
reboot, but these appear to be fixed now).

The vast majority of crashes I've had with any recent OS were caused by
hardware or bad drivers. (The joke is computers are just like road
safety - most crashes are caused by bad drivers). You must have some
dodgy hardware in that RH box, or dodgy hardware drivers. The RH
swervers I shepherd all had uptimes of greater than 400 days until I
needed to upgrade the kernel to a new version and reboot. That's the
only reason I reboot the Linux servers - for a brand new kernel. It
doesn't happen often.

My beef with Windows is what goes on underneath. Unix-style operating
systems have remained pretty free of cruft in their underlying system
calls. Windows on the other hand is a nightmare and it's easy to see why
so many applications have security holes and other bugs in Windows - the
API forces some truly baroque code to be written which is just ripe for
bugs. For example, on a Unix-style OS, if your server program must
listen for input off, say, a serial port, a named pipe and a TCP/IP
socket, a single routine can handle it all. In fact, a single syscall -
select() - can handle waiting for input on all these things on a single
thread, and also checking whether a fd is ready for writing.
Under Windows, only the socket interface has select(). To wait
on input and check a handle can be written to on the others,
you need different API calls for each. This will mean you wind up
running three threads, and this exposes you needlessly to race
conditions and all the other things you have to think of in a
multithreaded executable.

Other madness: there are many things in Windows that can ONLY be set
with the GUI out of the box. This makes scripting unnecessarily hard
when you have to go hunting down third party tools, roll your own tool,
or download a Microsoft tool which should have been included in the base
OS (most of the Resource Kit tools exemplify this).

I also discovered yesterday whilst making a new Windows XP system image
that we will be rolling out on the new machines on our network something
else that's incredibly dumb. In the process of locking down and turning
off as many unneeded services as possible, I switched off the DHCP
client. The machines all have static IPs, and don't need it. But guess
what - if you turn off DHCP, you can't set up a static IP address with
the 'netsh' command! I almost fell off my chair with surprise when I
found that out.

Windows doesn't feel designed when you get to the gory details - it
feels congealed. Unix-type operating systems have their own
shortcomings, but Windows just takes the biscuit for so many badly
thought out designs. It's truly the Morris Marina of operating systems.

Since NT when it first came out was going to be completely incompatible
with DOS and Win3.x apart from via what is essentially emulation,
Microsoft could have done away with all this cruft. Instead, they blew a
wonderful opportunity to make a clean OS. Yes, Windows is stable, and
I'm happy with the stability of the Windows systems I herd. Yes, all
hardware and all software sucks. However, Windows sucks unnecessarily.

--
Dylan Smith, Castletown, Isle of Man
Flying: http://www.dylansmith.net
Frontier Elite Universe: http://www.alioth.net
"Maintain thine airspeed, lest the ground come up and smite thee"

"Dylan Smith" wrote in message
...
[...] Yes, Windows is stable, and
I'm happy with the stability of the Windows systems I herd. Yes, all
hardware and all software sucks. However, Windows sucks unnecessarily.

It's funny. I've spent so many years reading all sorts of religious crap
about why Windows isn't any good that when I read a post like yours that
makes well-reasoned and legitimate complaints, I'm not really sure what to
do. As much as I like Windows (mainly because of familiarity with it),
I found myself nodding along with your post.

Anyway, I would agree that CJ's problems with his Linux system can probably
be traced to some issue with a particular driver for a particular piece of
hardware. Windows instabilities (and there are definitely some unstable
Window installations out there) are almost always traceable to some
third-party driver. That's the price you pay for supporting a wide range of
hardware. As Linux becomes more and more like Windows, we will be seeing
more and more of these same kinds of problems on Linux installations.

In our household we currently have two desktop PCs and two laptops. The
laptops get rebooted probably once a week or so, for reasons unrelated to
instability, but the desktops just keep chugging along. One is running
Windows 2000, the other is running Windows XP. Neither has ever crashed or
had to be rebooted because of some sort of software failure, and they have
gone months without rebooting for other reasons.

Programmability issues aside, Windows provides what I think is a very nice
user experience. It's different from other operating systems, but they all
have their problems and their strong points.

For what it's worth, it's my (very vague) recollection that the NT API was
not invented at Microsoft as a "clean sheet" API for NT specifically. Yes,
they had the opportunity to start fresh, but of course economics won out,
and they used a pre-existing template on which to base the OS. Plus, in
spite of the all-new underlying implementation details, they needed to be as
compatible with the existing Windows API as they could. They could
practically guarantee NO adoption of the NT/Win32 API if it bore no
resemblance to the API already in use.

In any case, I would have no problems using a Windows-based box in an
airplane, assuming it had gone through the same qualification testing that
any avionics box is required to. I know from personal experience that it's
quite possible, and not even all that difficult to configure and code on a
Windows installation in a way that ensure system stability.

Pete

"Dylan Smith" wrote in message
...
Except even Microsoft recommends you don't use their software in safety
critical devices.

IMHO, that's as much a CYA move by a company that's self-insured and has
deep pockets, as it is any sort of real indication of what they think of the
suitability of their OS for stuff like that. If they were serious about
keeping NT out of "safety critical devices", they wouldn't sell it to people
using it for "safety critical devices".

Pete

In article , "C J Campbell"
wrote:

What am I supposed to do? Believe my own experience, or believe
a bunch of anti-social geeks who begin frothing at the mouth and chewing
the carpet at the mere mention of Microsoft or Bill Gates?

well, as long as you have an open mind...

--
Bob Noel

Bob Noel writes:

The trick is to truly show that the device was indeed rock solid, and for
that history to be actually applicable to future use.

'taint no trick at all; we do it with voting machines now.

Bwahaha...

--kyler