Hardware Podcasts

175: How Hard Could It Be?

Embedded.fm · 9 Nov 2016 · 1h 15m

What this episode covers

Jean Labrosse, founder of Micrium (now part of Silicon Labs) and author of the uC/OS real-time operating system, explains the origins of his software, which began after his team encountered a bug in a commercial RTOS that the vendor refused to fix. He details the technical challenges of building a robust kernel, including handling race conditions, priority inversion, and stack overflows, and discusses the importance of clean code and certification for medical and avionics applications. Labrosse also advocates for using commercial RTOS support over free alternatives like FreeRTOS, arguing that the 'free puppy' analogy highlights the hidden costs of maintenance and debugging time.

Most relevant to

companies scaling up

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Silicon Labs
Products
uC/OS, FreeRTOS
Chips
Kinetis, ARM Cortex-M, 68HC11
Tools
MicroC Probe, SEGGER System View
Also
MISRA

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