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To: ZARAH who wrote (2393)	11/15/1997 2:08:00 PM
From: Larry Cannell	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10309

Here's an interesting post I found in news:comp.os.vxworks: Excerpts from netnews.comp.os.vxworks: 12-Nov-97 VxWorks vs NT by "Rahul Chopra"@nt.com > I am working on the VoIP initiative here. Wanted to know if anyone had > done any comparative analysis between NT and VxWorks. We're actually going to be examining real-time issues under NT and VxWorks in a course we're doing next semester. Here's some preliminary things: 1) NT: big. Need RAM, disk. VxWorks: small. Use what you need. for your application. 2) NT: bad predictability. VxWorks: good predictability. 3) NT: Win32, GUI stuff. VxWorks: can be done with add-ons ($). 4) NT: not been to Mars. VxWorks: been to Mars. 5) NT: limited priorities, at mercy of device drivers. Big priority inversion problems. VxWorks: 256 priorities, device drivers can be properly assigned priorities, no priority inversion problems (uses priority inheritance protocol). 6) NT: lots of device driver support from manufacturers. As in almost all of 'em. VxWorks: not so good. Still a lot of device driver support though. 7) NT: supports a few processors (x86, PPC, Alpha). Mostly for PC-class machines. VxWorks: supports a lot of different architectures. Not really intended for PC-class machines, works on VME chassis, PCI, ISA, others. Can be used on PC-class machines (which is what we'll be doing). If you are specifically interested in using NT for a real-time project in an embedded system, then I would suggest you use VxWorks instead. If you're interested in some real-time applications co-existing with your mail, word processor, etc. then NT is the way to go. If you want an embedded application with graphical interfaces, this is a toughy. VxWorks + 3rd party (Willows' Win32, RasterGraphics' SDL, et al.) can be used to do most graphical things pretty well. NT still has Win32, etc. support. Hope this helps. Note: it's very hard to do head-to-head comparisons, as you generally need (1) the same hardware, and (2) the same application mixture. Since NT and VxWorks are so different, (2) is usually the hard one. Knowing a little bit about how NT works internally, however, I think that VxWorks would probably win most of the performance battles. If you throw in the real-time extensions for NT, this is another kettle of fish. They do improve the predictability and "badness" of NT; however, they don't solve all of the problems. -- Kevin