What operating system is that oscilloscope running?

[GiskardReventlov]

I never thought much about this until I started looking into getting a scope. I've looked at the rigol thread and it looks like they're running linux of some kind. And I saw a tektronix on sale that had winXP logo on the screen.  Does anyone know what the predominant OS is for scopes?  I'm not interested in an OS war, just curious to know which vendors run which OS.

[Psi]

Its a bit of a mix
Cheap scopes sometimes don't use an OS at all, or use a realtime linux/BSD based OS

More expensive scopes sometimes use WinCE or WinXP embedded.
You don't see that on the cheap ones because of the licencing fees.

[Nerull]

The super high end agilent scopes run windows - XP on some models and the half million $ 96204 looks to be running windows 7 and even has a desktop.

[Alphatronique]

HI

most Tektronik scope TDS serie run VxWork

for Sure all the TDS 5xx and 7xx  ,7xxx and probably the newer version to

VxWork was very popular on thing like this for one that may paid the license since it not cheap

[free_electron]

agilent 2000 3000 4000 serie : WinCE
Agilent 6000 7000 series : VxWorks
All 'big iron' from Agilent : WinXp or win7

[Steffen]

I recently purchased a Tektronix MSO5054B for the company I work for. It runs Win 7 Ultimate 64bits. Surprisingly Windows boots up within seconds from that 500GB SSD inside where the Tektronix Scope application takes ages to load.

[dr.diesel]

I wrote Hameg and asked, all they would say is not Windows based.

[Psi]

I recently purchased a Tektronix MSO5054B for the company I work for. It runs Win 7 Ultimate 64bits. Surprisingly Windows boots up within seconds from that 500GB SSD inside where the Tektronix Scope application takes ages to load.

Most likely its using HORM (hibernate once, resume many)
You can get crazy boot times with that.

[electronics man]

Do the rigol scopes run any operating system

[dr.diesel]

Do the rigol scopes run any operating system

A Linux variant.

[w2aew]

Tek DPO/MSO 2000, 3000, 4000 run Linux
Tek DPO/MSO 5000, 7000, 70000 run Win7 Ultimate.

[ve7xen]

A Linux variant.

I'm pretty sure it's not Linux. It appears to be some sort of RTOS. I think someone figured out what it was in the Rigol hacking thread, but I'm not going to go digging for the details now  .

[free_electron]

you can create an embedded windows install. there is a tool for that. that is what agilent uses. it strips all the crap , autodetect and other things from windows.

you do an install once with all hardware in place and then lock it down. during boot there is no dynamic searching , no poking around to see if new hardware was installed , no waiting for driver update checks. load and run. such a system boots VERY fast.

some machines use deepfreeze.

[GiskardReventlov]

you can create an embedded windows install. there is a tool for that. that is what agilent uses. it strips all the crap , autodetect and other things from windows.

This is good to know, I admit when I saw the tektronix with winxp and a floppy drive I immediatley thought about a virus/trojan, etc.
That could really ruin the day on a scope.

you do an install once with all hardware in place and then lock it down. during boot there is no dynamic searching , no poking around to see if new hardware was installed , no waiting for driver update checks. load and run. such a system boots VERY fast.

That searching and poking around was exploited many times on PCs I recall.

[GiskardReventlov]

I'm pretty sure it's not Linux. It appears to be some sort of RTOS. I think someone figured out what it was in the Rigol hacking thread

I thought I saw something about linux on that thread. But I didn't read it all of course. Probably a safe bet that it's not vxworks or windows. Still leaves a lot of possibilities. Could make some educated guesses knowing what chip it runs.

[ve7xen]

I thought I saw something about linux on that thread. But I didn't read it all of course. Probably a safe bet that it's not vxworks or windows. Still leaves a lot of possibilities. Could make some educated guesses knowing what chip it runs.

It's an AD BlackFin. Linux can run on these, but I'm pretty sure it's not. Here are cybernet's comments from the hacking thread:

except a few offset bytes for lower half registers. also in there seem to be the bitstreams for the xilinx fpga (0xAA 0x99 0x55 0x66 header).
it seems to use lwip (there is plenty of AD sample code), embedded GoAhead-webs (Webserver), VDK threads
so far i was unable to get any sense, besides a chunk counter, out of the file headers.

VDK is VisualDSP, which is Analog's development environment for Blackfin. Rest is probably homebrew. The newer cheaper instruments (1074Z, DSAs, etc.) aren't BlackFin anymore though (moved to i.MX), so may use a different OS, which could certainly be Linux, and I haven't been following investigations on that front.

[GiskardReventlov]

@ve7xen

Amazing to think that the end user can add or possibly change functionality.  That should be a selling point but maybe they don't really want people making changes!

I think the i.MX is ARM and there have been lots of ARM changes going into the linux kernel lately.

[Rick Law]

@ve7xen

Amazing to think that the end user can add or possibly change functionality.  That should be a selling point but maybe they don't really want people making changes!

I think the i.MX is ARM and there have been lots of ARM changes going into the linux kernel lately.

I can just see it now - getting a high end scope with lots of CPU, so I can run SimCity on part of the screen, and play video poker while I wait for the scope to trigger.

[Alphatronique]

Hi  in scope i see WIN os  run from ram image   at boot it copy from disk to ram-drive  then launch os from the image

so if you power off or pull the plug it not croup the os and at each boot it clean ..

it may use another partition for same data and setting that need to remain

[GiskardReventlov]

Hi  in scope i see WIN os  run from ram image   at boot it copy from disk to ram-drive  then launch os from the image

Which scope are you using. Does the scope had a regular hard disk? It seems like that would be really noisy to have inside your scope. Or SSD?
So if the SSD (or HDD) is read-only then there would never be unwritten data but you can still lose data.

[calexanian]

I wonder if one can boot off the USB port puppy linux.. How much ram do these scopes have? puppy can squeeze itself and run on less than half a gig. It would be fun to have somebody write a hacked OS for a scope platform to do all the fun junk we want to do. 

[mrflibble]

http://rigol.codenaschen.de/index.php/Main_Page

[GiskardReventlov]

puppy can squeeze itself and run on less than half a gig

There are some small distros around that run in much, much less.  Busybox, aboriginalinux, DSL. All these can run in 50 megabytes or so. I guess I would try thme only if I'm ok with bricking the scope.