How significant is this [Cirrus] press release ?
As it was explained today to a roomful of analysts, very.
Cirrus is the long-awaited extension of VxWorks that embodies a revolutionary memory protection scheme and high availability. Protection is essential when the device has the flexibility of executing imported code, which is rarely guaranteed to be well-behaved. As I indicated in the back and forth with Ning, nothing comes for free, and even an obvious feature like memory protection may be deemed wasteful in a fixed-function, well-tested device. The Cirrus solution, however, finesses most of the burden operating systems typically suffer providing memory protecting. This makes memory protection in Cirrus a must have for most, if not all, future designs. Finally, memory protection is a standard checklist item for OS procurement, that no doubt represented a significant barrier to entry. To repeat a comment I made the other week, many people believe that if VxWorks had memory protection, there wouldn't be any other RTOS's.
High Availability (HA) is required in certain high-value markets. Ironically, VxWorks has seen limited success in these markets without HA features. Either developers went to the trouble to layer HA features on top of VxWorks (which is not easy and probably must less efficient than deeply embedding HA in the OS), or VxWorks operated in the extremities under control of an HA OS. High-end telephone carrier switches today often use VxWorks or pSOS in line-cards under control of a proprietary HA OS. If a line-card fails, the OS detects the failure and sends a signal to hotswap the card while continuing to function properly using the line-cards that do work -- similar to how RAID works. The carrier switch can be fault-tolerant, the fundamental HA requirement, even though each line-card is not in and of itself HA compliant.
With Cirrus complying with HA specifications, it can qualify as the OS controlling the high-end switch, as well as being the OS running each line-card. This opens the door for Cirrus to displace both proprietary and less appropriate commercial OSs that currently dominate the carrier space. In a nutshell, Cirrus opens a huge, extremely high-end market for verticals like TMS that otherwise were limited to the edge or enterprise markets.
Lots of other juicy morsels were conveyed at the analyst conference, many of which I will try to pass on to the thread ASAP.
Allen |
