Encyclopedia > VxWorks

Article Content

VxWorks

VxWorks, made and sold by Wind River Systems of Alameda, California, USA, is a real-time operating system. Similar real-time operating systems are available from other vendors: QNX, LynxOS[?], VRTX[?], pSOS, Windows CE, Nucleus RTX[?], etc..

Major features of VxWorks include a fast, multitasking kernel with pre-emptive scheduling and fast interrupt response, extensive intertask communications and synchronization facilities, efficient UNIX-compatible memory management, multiprocessor facilities, a shell for user interface, symbolic and source level debugging capabilities, performance monitoring and an I/O file system.

Because VxWorks is generally used in embedded systems, it requires a host workstation for program development. Unlike "native" systems such as UNIX and QNX, VxWorks development is done on a "host" machine running UNIX or Windows, cross-compiling target software to run on various "target" CPU architectures.

All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!