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Originally Posted by AustinSchuh
The robot needs to be realtime to be guaranteed to respond quickly to user and sensor input, and Linux is not designed to do that.
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So I don't know if you've noticed this or not, but how much realtime stuff did most people's code actually do this year? Answer: most probably did almost nothing. What about interrupts? Nothing again.
Thats what the FPGA is for, it takes care of the nasty latency dependent stuff for us (among other things).
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It's designed to run on servers and desktops where a bit of latency isn't an issue. There are patches that have been made to make the linux kernel more real time, but they aren't nearly as good as running an actual realtime OS.
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I won't disagree, but I don't think the realtime stuff is a huge issue for what most people are doing. If there were no FPGA, then I'd definitely agree. Otherwise... hard to say.
From the experience I've had so far, porting software to vxWorks is really annoying (even nix-like software) because it has random oddities in its networking library (and other libraries too). The biggest advantage I see for linux would be that theres a *ton* of software that would pretty much *just work* without too much modification. Not so with vxWorks.
Then we wouldn't be just talking about java bots, we could have python bots or ruby bots...
