Has anyone run VxWorks on a desktop PC as a target

Question

Can I use a desktop PC to run VxWorks as the operating system? In other words, can a standard PC be used as a target processor? I'm not talking about hosting Workbench and a VxSim on the same machine. Rather, I'm considering running just VxWorks (and my application) on a PC.

It seems feasible as long as we can configure a board support package, and write or obtain device drivers for the I/O cards on the PCI bus. What I wonder is, has anyone actually done this?

I'm interested in saving a bit of money on hardware over a single board computer and cPCI backplane by using a spare desktop sitting around unused. The application is for a test set to be used in a lab. So, I don't need the portability, etc. of a typical embedded processor.

Chuddar

Answer 1

Totally Possible.
There are a number of BSPs that work out of the box: pcPentium4 is the canonical one, but with the new processors/bridge combos, there are specific BSPs available. Those BSPs start with itl_
Boot device can be a USB flash drive, a floppy drive or a hard disk.

Mella

Thanks. I feel silly having missed the pcPentium bsp. On the other hand, I never would have found the itl_ packages on my own. I will try it out on a old laptop. – Chuddar

Answer 2

I used to do it all the time. These days it is even simpler as you can run VxWorks on top of VmWare and use one PC as both host and a target system. Contact your friendly local Wind River TAM/FAE as they might provide you with preconfigured project/BSP.

Ploch

The VmWare setup is very interesting! I'm keeping it in mind for future projects. My current project involves a lot of high speed I/O and a ~60 ms main loop. I'm not sure that VMware hosted VxWorks will give me the tight interrupt latency bounds that a native VxWorks provides. Wouldn't the latencies be determined by the OS VMware is running on? – Chuddar

To run VxWorks on VMware, shouldn't there be a iso image or something? How and where can I get the vxworks iso image? – Cabral