The design and capabilities of Tornado-
are layed out in the following document: Tornado - A Wind River Systems White Paper at- wrs.com
On paper it appears to be a well designed and thought out IDE (Integrated Development Enviornment).
There are two levels to the Tornado environment. One is the target side, which is where the realtime operating system VxWorks runs. The other is the host side, where the development tools run. The target side looks very solid.
However, the host implementation of Tornado on the Windows 95/NT platform continues to draw criticism from some developers on the comp.os.vxworks newsgroup (see below). While this may be categorized as anecdotal, it brings up a key issue regarding Tornado. Namely-
Does Wind River "eat it's own dog food". This phrase was coined by Dave Cutler, Microsoft's NT Manager/Architect. It means, does a company use its own software tools internally to develop its software products. If not, then that is a major problem, because it puts a company out of touch with its customers. The unanswered question on comp.os.vxworks is do the developers at WindRiver use the Windows 95/NT implemenation of Tornado to develop and build the Windows 95/NT version of Tornado? If so, then their interests are aligned with that of their users and all the kinks should be worked out eventually. However, there has been some speculation that the Windows 95/NT version of Tornado is developed on Sun workstations under Unix.
Short term this issue has no importance and won't effect the stock price. However, in the long term it will certainly effect the success of Tornado, given the fact that Windows 95/NT appears to be the host development enviroment of choice for more and more developers. Paradoxically, if the WRS developers are working under Windows 95/NT then that has them playing in the Microsoft sandbox, which raises another set of issues (for latter).
Dave
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From: hjb@pso.com (H.J. Bae)
Newsgroups: comp.os.vxworks
Subject: re: Opinion about Win95 Tornado
Organization: Peaceful Star
In article leonid@rst.co.il (Leonid Rosenboim) wrote:
>Our experience show us that Windows NT 3.5 and 3.51 is probably the
>best PC platform for Tornalo, which has developed originally with >this particular system. Windows NT 4.0 Beta on the other hand was
>practically unusable with Tornado (it was never claimed to be supported
>by WRS).
Well... I have used Tornado with Windows NT 3.5, 3.51, 3.51+service-packs, 4.0 beta, 4.0 released, and Windows 95. And I have used them on about 10 different Pentium based PC platforms, ranging from IBM Aptivas, NCA Alexis series, numerous clones, etc. In each of HW configuration, I checked each of the components with the massive Microsoft HW competibility list to make sure there aren't any problems. I had problems in all cases. To list a few of the problems: (1) installation bugs, (2) lousy editor, (3) target server configuration -- when you specify more than one, configuration entries get confused, (4) target/host communication which is very fragile and frequently disconnected, (5) connection restart -- the way it works, the host doesn't come up when the target becomes available. Sometimes it does sometimes it doesn't, (6) gdb problems -- there are too many problems with wdb connection, including problems with communication between host and target being aborted in the middle of debug session, not being able to kill a gdb session even when you really want to (it just refuses to die), not being able to restart when you want, not being able to set global breakpoints, etc. , (7) shell problems: the TCL based tornado shell implements many of the commands in TCL, but not all. Some are in TCL some are still in C and there is no reconciliation or integration between these 2. The whole architecture is inconsistent. The command line editing doesn't work. etc. etc. (8) most importantly, Tornado itself crashes, all the time. |
