On Saturday, Jeff Eppler wrote, in part: > Building the kernel and rtai are usually more time-consuming than > building emc itself. That leads us to build for a very small number of > operating system releases, and to build with conservative options that > we judge will work on the greatest number of machines. With the next > release we'll probably look at enabling SMP; we know that this will > restrict rtai to working only on systems with APIC, but in 2010 it's > probably only a small minority of machines that don't have APIC. If > testing proves us wrong, we'll take it out and remain restricted to > using a single CPU or core. In another few years, maybe we'll be in a > position to make a similar decision about 64 bits as the standard that > will work on all but a few uninteresting machines. > "To be (backward compatible) or not to be (backward compatible), that is the question".
During my working life, I saw this problem crop up over and over again, both in hardware and in software. There will always be a "small minority" of working systems that don't meet new criteria. I wouldn't be surprised if a significant number of them are in machines being used to make a living. To the extent that the EMC2 developers can separate extensions and repairs of the EMC2 application-level software from the evolution of the underlying real-time O/S, the problem remains relatively manageable, since users of existing systems can stay abreast of the features that directly affect their ability to machine parts without the necessity (as opposed to desirability) of upgrading their computing platform too. I trust you and the other primary EMC2 developers to keep wrestling with the dynamic tension this situation creates. I trust the EMC2 users to be understanding that nothing is forever. Keep up the good work. Regards, Kent ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
