[hatsubai]

I am one of the OS developers for a military vehicle that utilizes vxWorks and Linux. It's honestly no different than other OS work out there. Documentation and help outside of WindRiver's official docs are more scarce, and open source support is smaller, but grasping how an RTOS works vs a GPOS isn't any major mental leap. If you can program in C and understand communication protocols like i2c, UART, SPI, CAN, etc. then it's not terrible.

Right now, we are looking at moving away from vxWorks and onto a Yocto-built Linux with the RT patches to the scheduler. From a requirements standpoint, the RT patches meet our needs for "real time" since our timings require more of a soft real time than a hard one. There's also way more support out there for Linux, and I am also slightly biased in that I am more of a Linux guy than a vxWorks guy simply due to familiarity and ease of troubleshooting.

This latest news with vxWorks is great, however. I actually sent this to management because we are attempting to figure out what direction to take as our current version is reaching EOL.

[therealjumbo]

>Right now, we are looking at moving away from vxWorks and onto a Yocto-built Linux

This decision is probably out of your hands, but I'm happy to share a few words of caution. I've been the yocto distro maintainer at a large firm for about three years and I absolutely despise it. BMW released a slide deck about their experience with yocto, and it was mostly "it sucks." I read that recently and it matched my experience down to a t.

If you absolutely need third party commercial support, yocto is probably the only game in town, but if you don't, I would highly recommend looking at nix (which recently gained cross compile support) or buildroot.

I'm dead serious about avoiding yocto if at all possible, I've seen things I wish I could unsee. But that sounds about right for a military project.

EDIT: I put my email into my profile if you want to chat about yocto more in depth.