Re: Realtime and ADA - stupid newby question

[James Rogers <jimmaureenrogers@att.net>]

Marc Pelletier <marc@goldak.stopspam.ca> wrote in
news:Xns941E9E3E5D94Cmpgexx2@216.168.3.44: 

> James Rogers <jimmaureenrogers@att.net> wrote in 
> news:Xns941E98AEE4B8Cjimmaureenrogers@204.127.36.1:
> 
>> PharLap
>> bundled with Aonix Object Ada
> 
> Is Pharlap an rtos? My quick reading of their website seemed to
> indicate that it was a dos extender that made dos "more" realtime.
> Admittedly that may be real enough for my task.
> 

When I worked with it we used the ETS OS, which is clearly an RTOS.
It has a very nice feature. The API is a subset of the WIN32 API.
This means you can do a lot of unit testing on your development
PC before recompiling for the target. This helps speed development
and lowers contention for the development target system.

In 1999 PharLap was working on adding some optional GUI extensions
to ETS. I never used that version.

I liked ETS because we could tailor the complexity and size of the
RTOS. We could use a bare-bones kernel requiring about 6K of memory,
or we could add features such as a full file system, a TCP/IP stack,
and several other interesting drivers. The file system could support
disk-on-chip implementations so that you could treat a ramdisk as
though it was a hard drive. We used a 40Mb ramdisk as though it was
a Win32 file system on a disk drive, including the ability to define
directories as well as files.

The amount of stack space, and the number of tasks supported by ETS
was limited only by the amount of memory on your system. The OS did
not provide hard limits to the number of tasks.

Jim Rogers