VxWorks
More info
- Creator
- Wind River Systems
- Released
- 1987
- Type
- Real-time operating system
- License
- Proprietary
Wind River's commercial real-time operating system, with several space probes and airliners on its CV.
Wind River started out selling an add-on layer for another RTOS, VRTX, and shipped its own kernel in 1987. VxWorks has since become the default wherever people pay for certification and support rather than for freedom from licence fees: avionics, industrial robots, network gear and defence systems.
Its most famous moment was Mars Pathfinder in 1997. The lander kept resetting itself on the Martian surface, and debugging from Earth revealed a textbook priority inversion between three threads. The fix was to enable priority inheritance on a mutex by uploading a configuration change — the feature had been there all along, just switched off. Curiosity runs VxWorks too.