VxWorks - VxWorks is a fairly Real Time Operating System (RTOS) from Wind River Systems.
I say "fairly", because the API does not cater for timeouts shorter than one tick (the default tick rate is 60Hz). The ability to do this is a fundamental requirement for a hard real time system.
This RTOS was never designed to be secure so has lots of easy exploits, many of which affect the reliability of systems designed using it. (They used to make a big deal of 99.999% (five nines) reliability, but my WGR614v3 is nowhwere near that, crashing with well under 100000 packets transferred under heavy wireless activity!) VxWorks also makes a great target for code hackers. E.g. See what has been done at TCN-ISO.
Strangely, but probably mostly due to the customer base built in the 90's it still seems to be pretty popular, even for new products. VxWorks development used to be performed (for v5.x) with the Tornado development environment. This depends on GDB as the debugger and normally the GNU compilers. (WRS bought Diab Data for their compilers, but the code quality was rarely better than GNU and only supports a limited number of CPUs, and also have at least two alternative debuggers, SingleStep and VisionClick.) There are many better solutions for most problems these days. Wind River seem to be acknowledging this as they try to get on the Linux/Eclipse band wagon.
For VxWorks v6.x and Wind River's own Linux variant, they have abandoned their Tornado development and started to adopt Eclipse, with their own proprietry version, called Workbench. However, that means that anyone wanting to switch from VxWorks v5.x needs to make the investment in acquiring and learning a new tool set. (Amazing the development efforts that a company will abandon, when they see a ship about to sail off without them, rather than try to fulfill their marketing for previous products.)
The main alternatives are Embedded Linuxes, Express Logic with ThreadX, Green Hills Software with INTEGRITY, Enea with OSE, Mentor Graphics with Neucleus, LynuxWorks with LynxOS or even an own built scheduler.
The author has used all of these technologies over the last 15 years, except Neucleus.
