Anybody having knowledge on VRTX

Question

I need to understand the internals of VRTX ( A RTOS).

• How is it different from other commercial/free RTOS?
• What makes VRTX unique in Embedded systems?

Answer 1

I have not encountered VRTX since the early '90s. Is this a legacy project? Is it still available? The Wikipedia article on it seems to suggest so, but its owners, Mentor Graphics also own Nucleus, and they push that hard; I have never seen them offer VRTX at a trade show.

As I recall, it is a fairly conventional RTOS with pre-emptive multitasking scheduler, and the usual gamut of IPC and resource mechanisms. I used it on 16bit x86 hardware - that's how long ago it was!

How is it different from other commercial/free RTOS?

What makes VRTX unique in Embedded systems?

Aren't those both the same question? I would say that it is solidly conventional and not particularly unique at all. It is commonly considered to be the first commercially available RTOS, and as such RTOS's that followed use many of its pioneering ideas (one reason for its lack of uniqueness is that it is the grandfather of all the others perhaps).

I was once told (by a Windriver employee) that the name of WindRiver's VxWorks was a dig at VRTX being a contraction of "Like-VRTX-but-it-Works". This may be apocryphal, but VxWorks is pretty ordinary as well.