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Robert La Ferla wrote: > http://www.akihabaranews.com/en/news-17171-When+Linux+goes+bad+at+10%2C000+Feet.html People that see a crash and make all sorts of extrapolations about "stability" bug me... I've "flown" linux on embedded systems that were at near-space altitudes, and in my experience OS crashes are almost always hardware related. So the poster's implication that BSD might have done better in that situation is highly questionable. (note: I've never used Windows or it's variants in that environment) It turns out that heat dissipation is a real problem for flying embedded systems (even at altitudes where it's fairly cold), since you need to seal them pretty good to keep moisture out, and you can't rely on the outside air being cold all the time since there is a significant portion of the flight when you're close to the (relatively hot) ground. This might be less of an issue on a passenger-jet than on a space-constrained UAV, but the point is that no OS can compensate for an overheated processor or memory chips... On the other hand, it could be that the on-board video system uses a custom/proprietary driver, and that driver turned out to be flaky. Not only would a BSD-based system have the same problem, you could argue that the more liberal licensing terms of BSD vs. the linux kernel would encourage closed-source/proprietary drivers (and the associated flaky-ness). Matt
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