Sun Microsystems Inc has found a real-time operating system for its Sparc RISC microprocessor family in the shape of Wind River Systems Inc’s VxWorks. The market for commercial and technical Unix systems is enormous, but to get the Sparc accepted as a complete alternative to the Motorola and Intel families, it needs also to find its way into military and control applications and for that, a real-time operating system is essential. VxWorks is a real-time operating system with integrated networking support and a complete software development environment specifically designed to work in partnership with Unix. It is described as incorporating both an extremely powerful real-time kernel and a highly functional real-time networked software development environment, and is already available on the Sun-3. new implementation of VxWorks will be fully compatible with all Sun-4 workstations and servers. We have seen tremendous interest in the use of the Sparc architecture for embedded real-time systems, says Wind River’s president, Jerry Fiddler, president of Wind River in Berkeley, California: the combination of Sun’s Unix system workstations and VxWorks real-time software provides the most powerful RISC platform for real-time application development today. VxWorks has also been implemented on Sony Corp’s News Unix workstation line.
