One must have balls of steel to run windows on a spaceship.
> If the watchdog timer has not been restarted and instead times out after ~30 seconds, the satellite enters something called safemode. Safemode is when all non critical functions are automatically shut down and the satellite becomes entirely focused on generating power by pointing its solar panels towards the Sun and trying to reestablish any communication that was lost. It’s a state the vehicle goes into when something bad happens [...] the satellite equivalent of a blue screen of death.
If only Windows would be so kind!
But what would you run? QNX? BSD?
A better way to put my argument is: could an average mom build Linux on specialized hardware in space? If the answer is "yes", then you may have a point.
I don't think the answer is yes.
Just because you can read it, doesn't mean you can or will be able to actually fix it; not because of technicality, but because of personal knowledge.
In this case, they are both black boxes.
I once spent three days trying to figure out an issue, stepping line by line through hadoop (after figuring out the issue was in hadoop and not my own code). Yay, I proved the issue was actually in Java itself. Guess what happened next? We avoided the bug. Why?
- We couldn't update Java.
- We couldn't change hadoop because we were using a packaged solution. So, we just filed a bug with them.
Had the source not been available, we would have just skipped all of that, and it would have been our vendor's problem 3 days earlier.
This happens less nowadays, because stuff like Android and ChromeOS, so why pay Microsoft when free beer OSes exist.
If you look at an LTS branch, you'll see there are hundreds of point releases. Usually a point release is created once every 5-10 days. I interpret that to mean bugs were not found until many weeks after the LTS branch was cut. Obviously, not all of them affect you, but many patches apply important subsystems which affect you.
That said, this is on the scale that I'm surprised off-the-shelf things are even being considered. I'd have thought they'd just roll something bespoke and that's the end of that.
With Windows, you need to beg and pay Microsoft for customizations and hope these changes will not cause other issues.
Plus, most space projects are on a tight and limited budgets where management would rather spend on hardware than software.
Detailed writeup by project manager: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=27043.0 (doesn't mention the OS)
Some indication the laptops on ISS run linux on HP ZBooks: https://training.linuxfoundation.org/solutions/corporate-sol...
Commodity equipment running specialized distros of Linux is a growing thing however.
Linux RT merge: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
Also RTOS tend to have a lot of verification work applied so that you can be confident some facilities just won't fail.