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RedHat eCOS Flies in Space
Brindafella writes "Brindafella reports that Redhat is flying in space as the OS for Canada's Smallest Satellite: The Canadian Advanced Nanospace eXperiment (CanX-1)[300k PDF], one of the flock of 1kg pico-satellites launched on 1 July 03 by a Russian rocket. Redhat eCos stands for embedded Configurable operating system, an open source real-time operating system (eCos Home Page). See the eCos Programmer's Guide for the CubeSat Computer: Introduction, Hardware Model, Development Setup, and Loading the eCos. The CANX-1 site at the University of Toronto, Canada gives more details, such as: The satellite is a 10cm cube, with a mass less than one kilogram; The satellite will generate about two Watts of peak power using direct energy conversion; Main Computer Board - Atmel AT91R40807 based on ARM7TDMI Thumb Processor, 40 MHz, 1 MB SRAM, 32 MB Flash, 200 mW max, 98 x 96 x 8 mm."
Lets just say they used good FLASH, and no swap (eCOS needs no swap).
The FLASH is probably only for uploading new program code to run the instruments onboard - I doubt they're using it for realtime storage, since that'd best be done downstairs. Since typical FLASH systems can withstand 10,000 or so re-writes before things go bitty, and presumably these guys used good stuff, I'd say thats enough for a lot of program updates.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
It's called "solar power".
I forgot to include this in my earlier posting: STS-113 pre-flight and picosat launch photos
Enjoy!