Mike Hall - Why are there so many operating systems?
- Posted: Jun 24, 2004 at 9:59 AM
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You've seen Mike Hall give a tour of his lab. You've seen him build an operating system for a new device. So why do we need a new operating system? Why can't Windows XP do everything? Mike answers.
Oh, and he shows off a really cool virtual roller coaster robot that's controlled by Windows CE. Made by Kuka, the "RoboCoaster" (you can ride this in Legoland in Denmark).
Oh, and he shows off a really cool virtual roller coaster robot that's controlled by Windows CE. Made by Kuka, the "RoboCoaster" (you can ride this in Legoland in Denmark).
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Why i Can't download to watch,only watch oneline??
thanks!
Note: This will work in IE only.
UPDATED: forget what I said above, it apears that this method seems to be blocked.
I have to reupload all the videos so that you can download them. It'll take some time. I'm working on it.
Although always check that you are allowed to make an offline copy.
He points out that one difference is that CE supports multiple architectures (mips, arm etc) and XP needs x86. I'm not convinced this is true.
NT was designed as a layered system with the HAL providing core specific support. So wouldn't they just need a HAL for arm and XP would run on it?
Windows XP Embedded is a componentized version of the Windows XP Professional binaries which only ship for x86.
Windows CE is built with multiple processor core support built into the product "Platform Builder" is the tool that's used to configure and build your Windows CE operating system image, you choose which O/S components you want and the processor and BSP you want to target.
- Mike
Yes, correct, you choose which 'bits' of the Windows XP Embedded operating system you need for your device, you can completely replace the shell, add your own applications etc...
I've pinged the Scoble to get him over to record a Windows XP Embedded video...
- Mike
Mike, said that Windows CE is Real time and that its kernel footprint is about 200Kb and componentised. Can you imagine if Windows XP where that way? we could have our PC turned in to speed demons.
I think MS is capable of using a single OS Kernel and getting rid of competition, in a single shot!
What is in NT that doesn't allows it to be real time?. Alright! I know that NT kernel must do a lot of more stuff.
Please can someone explain me why this hasn't been done yet? or all of what I said is just none sense?
You may be interested to know that this robot is using Windows CE real-time capabilities for command and control of the robot - nothing like a PDA, eh!
Windows XP/Embedded can be a real-time operating system with the addition of some 3rd party real-time extensions.
Check out the following page for more information about real-time systems and real-time extensions for Windows XP Embedded - http://msdn.microsoft.com/embedded/choose/techinsights/realtime/default.aspx
- Mike
CE makes a number of size/speed tradeoffs to get that small. Read up on CE's memory model at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dncenet/html/advmemmgmt.asp. I'm a Pocket PC developer, mainly, and we keep hitting that DLL load problem.
CE 3.0 and earlier don't build a complete set of page tables that the processor can access automatically, when encountering a virtual address it doesn't have in its Translation Lookaside Buffer. The TLB is a special hardware cache which maps a virtual address to a physical address in constant time. The x86 and ARM processors' memory management units can fill the TLB in hardware without raising a software interrupt, but this feature wasn't used, partly because MIPS and SHx processors don't offer this feature. The result is that the processor raises an exception (page fault) every time a page is accessed which hasn't been accessed recently. CE 4.1 (IIRC) and later support this feature and get something like a 20% speed improvement over previous versions.
The other impact is of course that CE doesn't offer anything like the feature set of XP. XP's GDI offers world transforms and multiple mapping modes, allowing you to draw using different co-ordinate systems and the OS to perform (most) graphical scaling. CE only offers 1:1 mapping between GDI co-ordinates and screen pixels. CE drops a large number of drawing APIs: where XP has MoveTo, LineTo, etc, CE only offers Polyline.
CE doesn't have much of a graphics acceleration API, essentially only allowing hardware-accelerated blits (bitmap copies to the screen). XP's graphics stack allows the hardware to claim accelerated support for a complicated operation, then call back into GDI to perform some portions of the operation in software and divide it into simpler operations that can be accelerated. This back-and-forth nature allows virtually the same output to be produced on very different hardware, but it can be slow, which is why DirectX exists (which is all-or-nothing - either all accelerated, or all emulated).
I actually wonder if CE's days as the basis for Pocket PC and Smartphone are numbered - the requirements of those devices are drifting away from the requirements of a hard real-time embedded system.
>>I actually wonder if CE's days as the basis for Pocket PC and Smartphone are numbered
My hunch would be that CE is put out to pasture after 5.0, and that future Windows Mobile versions (after the expected Windows Mobile 2005) are based on XP Embedded. [and you can be pretty sure someone will have got it running on ARM with real-time extensions]
This would explain the 'is Cardhu [Ce 6.0] alive or dead' debate, and [as I've posted as a comment to the recent CE 5.0 licensing story] also why Microsoft might not be so precious about licensees' derivative works on CE5.0 and the platform fragmentation this could cause.
- Mike
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