"Contrary to assertions an F1 car does need an O/S. It is not like a street car. The engine itself is not the issue, it is the wireless link, the telemetry, the fuel management and so on that is critical."
All of which can be done on hardware w/ flash. The parent is completely right in that the addition of an OS can only harm the ECM. For the 2006 Formula SAE competition (think college level F1) our car had a radio transmiter which transmitted all of the pertinent data to a laptop including the telemetry, fuel and ignition lookup tables with A/F compensation. All of this was run from several ICs and a PIC microprocessor running things behind the scenes with some very simple code in comparisson to any OS.
And, if you think that all of the above items are not important for modern street cars, think again. Aside from wireless telemetry and the speed in which data has to be processed, the control systems are much more complicated than that found on race cars.
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All of which can be done on hardware w/ flash. The parent is completely right in that the addition of an OS can only harm the ECM. For the 2006 Formula SAE competition (think college level F1) our car had a radio transmiter which transmitted all of the pertinent data to a laptop including the telemetry, fuel and ignition lookup tables with A/F compensation. All of this was run from several ICs and a PIC microprocessor running things behind the scenes with some very simple code in comparisson to any OS. And, if you think that all of the above items are not important for modern street cars, think again. Aside from wireless telemetry and the speed in which data has to be processed, the control systems are much more complicated than that found on race cars.