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This hits on the core of why we still use what we do in military aerospace. COTS stuff just can’t hit the requirements nowadays.

Personally the newest X86 I’ve seen in this type of stuff was an 80286; everything newer has been POWER or SPARC of one flavor or another, typically running VXWORKS. I haven’t by any means seen everything though.

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Agreed here. I do this type work for a career, and if you need safety critical + real time (which really just means known and bounded time) guarantees, anything with an ME type device that can usurp the cores is generally a no go. Especially if the source for the firmware for said ME is not accessible.

Actually, RedHawk Linux is widely used in the US “defense” industry. It supports modern hardware and even provides real-time performance when using CUDA. It is not exactly the PREEMPT_RT though.

https://concurrent-rt.com/products/software/redhawk-linux/

I have actually run into that on one or two things, but there were only peripheral to what I deal with. Drones, aircraft, etc. have all been what I mentioned in my (limited) experience.

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