Experiences, strategies and challenges in adapting PVM to VxWorks™ hard real-time operating system, for safety-critical software

The role performed by Open Source Software in safety-critical systems is growing and gaining importance. Due to many, and large variety of, hard real-time constraints and functional requirements that safety-critical applications have to meet, these applications are nowadays composed by logical and physical components, deployed on heterogeneous distributed platforms. This paper is part of a still ongoing project, and is concerned with exploring experimentally the porting of PVM to VxWorks™: the latter has an internal architecture very different from the Unix standard OS(s) (like for example Linux or Solaris™), which in turn is the reference OS platform for PVM. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005