Comments on: Linux On Mars

By: experforensic accounting

experforensic accounting — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 09:00:01 +0000

That’s really a fantastic post ! i added to my favorite blogs list..

By: gachies

gachies — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 10:20:48 +0000

wow, wonderful images. it is great to see. i think it is photoshoped, but it’s amazing .

By: pest

pest — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 06:08:12 +0000

That’s really a fantastic post ! i added to my favourite blogs list..

I have been reading your blog last couple of weeks and enjoy every bit. Thanks

By: Entertainment

Entertainment — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 13:39:03 +0000

Wow, they used this because it is free. I too like linux……..

By: jc

jc — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 16:23:04 +0000

386 CPU’s were first introduced 22 years ago not a decade ago.

By: VME Chassis

VME Chassis — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 17:41:37 +0000

Just clarifying what Xavi said… the Rad6000 CPU is enclosed in a VME chassis.

By: Sparticus

Sparticus — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 03:01:31 +0000

1: Hooray NASA
2: To reiterate for the thousandth time, yes, if you only write and test 10 lines of code per day, you are in the wrong profession. Fortunately, someone will likely solve this problem for you.

As to ~~~~~~’s comments: What? Make sure the code is corrent? Is that a combination of correct / current? That does not give perfect sense.

By: ~~~~~~~~

~~~~~~~~ — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 14:22:11 +0000

Maybe 10 lines of code in C is an example usage of integrated assembler with AT&T syntax in C. Because that gives perfectly sense, and you must be 100% sure the code is corrent and won’t break anything, when you make a typo like cx instead of bx, it can lead to damage of machine…

By: mars software guy

mars software guy — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:05:05 +0000

Okay - Linux vs. Windows vs. RTOS folks: Simon already posted corrections to the “VxWorks is a form of Linux” comment. I’m sure Simon’s heard a fair share about this, because I have too!
I bear no grudge, in fact it’s kind of an honor to be mistaken as related to one of the most popular software packages on this planet. Then again, we are the most popular software on Mars!

By: Xavi

Xavi — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 09:09:42 +0000

Lastly RTLinux and all other Linuxes have slow RT performance … whereas real RTOSes (VxWorks and RTEMS) have RT responses in the 100s of nanoseconds to microsecond response times … somewhere around there …

By: Xavi

Xavi — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 09:02:04 +0000

VxWorks is NOT a variant of Linux … it is NOTHING like Linux. VxWorks draws its heritage from VRTX a 1980s based OS.

VxWorks is an RTOS. Linux is a computer OS (with a lot of application and device driver bloat). They are very different. This article is not accurate.

Phoenix uses VxWorks and runs a Rad6000 CPU (I think in a VME chassis). It is the replacement for a previous failed lander attempt.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 13:30:46 +0000

@Kevin:

I made that first commment that you are referring to. I completely agree that 20-30 years ago, 10 lines of QUALITY code could do an awful lot. That’s not in question. The point I (as well as a few other posters) am making is that 10 lines of code 30 years ago do not equal 10 lines of code today. 10 lines of code per day, using current-gen programming languages, will only serve to get you fired.

I am in complete agreement that with the CPU speed, RAM, and Disk Storage that is available today, many programmers have forgotten (or just never learned) about properly optimizing, or even attempting to optimize, their code. Bring up Big O with most programmers today and they are likely to just give you a dumb look, and go back to their Visual Basic.

By: mamut

mamut — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 19:44:11 +0000

10 lines per day? those engineers need to get a kick in their asses and get fired!

No wonder we are so screwed with NASA with dumb people like that. 10 lines of code per day? My gosh!!! What kind of monkeys are working at NASA? Obviously, an average human can code more than 400+ lines per day in C++, Perl, Python, Java.

For 10 lines of code per day, I think monkeys or some kind of low brain entity is doing that crappy job.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 19:43:44 +0000

I saw comments by Anonymous on the number of lines of code and have these comments…Being “brought up” with limited memory, no disk and SLOOOW CPUs in the 70s and 80s, I know of programmers who can do more in 10 QUALITY lines of code than the coders who hack together systems today can do in 500 lines. Back in those days, you had to write really tight code just to run in small memory systems and that could run fast with little or no disk. Tell that to today’s coders who have little or no consideration for code CPU performance, memory or disk usage. Many of them think if it clean compiles and runs one thread of logic under a debugger, it is ready for Beta testing…

By: john

john — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 18:29:50 +0000

that cpu is probably a mips R’family.
if so then it’s more powerfull than a sony playstation.
(that used a 33mhz R3000 - a 6000 would be a big architectural jump!)

By: peter

peter — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 17:58:32 +0000

VxWorks is a hard real time OS, while Linux is not. If patched with Xenomai, Linux becomes hard real time OS, but still slightly slower than VxWorks. Xenomai patch contains “skins”. One of them is VxWorks skin which provides VxWorks API for easier porting to Linux platforms. VxWorks is real-time executive (kernel and applications are in the same memory space), while Linux has a monolithic kernel - kernel and applications are in different memory space. Difference between those two OSs is significant are they are not the same, eventhough API may be similar (POSIX). I agree with one, Windoze is not suitable for mission critical systems and whith it’s price should be avoided and replaced by desktop Linux.

By: mrintegrity

mrintegrity — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 06:08:00 +0000

vxworks is a version of UNIX, NOT linux… seriously - you can’t possibly know anything about linux or unix if you think they are the same thing!!

The wikipedia article you link to doesn’t even say it’s linux, it uses a proprietary licence and is a version of Unix plain and simple.

By: Laborin

Laborin — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 05:54:21 +0000

That 33 Mhz risc cpu can not be compared to an 386, remember that mhz != speed.
Mhz means cycles, not necessary instructions… Some instructions needs more than 100 cycles to be executed in a intel architecture.
In a risc cpu, things go much better.

By: C

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 04:26:57 +0000

where the hell did you get 10 loc/day?

Must be perl, then, and each line is a few hundred characters.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 18:05:14 +0000

10 lines of code per day??? Granted, the people at Nasa are amazing, and I don’t want to detract from the amazing things they do every single day, but if a programmer writes 10 lines of a code in a day, tests it, and then calls it a day, he or she is going to get fired. Fast. 100 lines of fully tested code is slow. Maybe I am a faster programmer than I give myself credit for. Maybe I’m in a faster paced environment than what would be considered ‘average’. I call a good day of programming 500 lines of code, fully tested. Granted, NASA is putting out 2-3 times that, but I highly doubt they have only one person doing their coding and testing.

This of course is a major tangent from the point of the article, which otherwise was very informative. I just thought that the estimations of NASA’s code output versus the average programmer was WAY off.