Re: FreeBSD and Robotics

On Sun, Jun 17, 2007 at 10:38:54PM -0700, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:

There's another issue and that is POST on standard PC hardware. POST
takes too long. For example the auto industry has agreed on a standard
time that a car engine computer must be fully operational, it is very
short, no more than something like 2 seconds or so. Enough so that when
you turn the key and the engine starts cranking, that the engine computer
has completely booted and is running by the second crank.

That is why you probably will never see standard computer hardware used
in the operating room of a hospital to control patient life support, for
example. If for example during an operation the computer controlling an
artificial heart suddenly dies, the staff simply unplugs the lines from
the computer and plug them into another computer which then is switched on
and within a second has come fully ready, and operating. You could not
wait the 30-60 seconds that POST on a regular PC would take to complete.

If it's taking 30-60 seconds just for your system to POST, there's
something desperately wrong. My laptop gets all the way to a login
prompt in that range. I think you mean "boot", not "POST" -- where
"POST" stands for "Power On, Self-Test" and refers to that brief period
at the beginning of booting before the boot manager is loaded. You know,
the part where there's a screen that says "IBM" or "AMI" or something
like that.

--
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
John W. Russell: "People point. Sometimes that's just easier. They also use
words. Sometimes that's just easier. For the same reasons that pointing has
not made words obsolete, there will always be command lines."
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