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VxWorks, made and sold by Wind River Systems of Alameda, California, USA, is a real-time operating system. Similar real-time operating systems are available from other vendors: QNX, LynxOS, VRTX, pSOS, Nucleus RTX, OSE etc.
The name VxWorks is believed to be a pun on the VRTX real-time operating system, at the time created by Ready Systems, now a Mentor Graphics product. In the early 1980s VRTX was a new product and did not work so well. It was 4KB in size and could not be fully used as an operating system. Wind River acquired the rights to resell VRTX with an extension named VxWorks which was workable (including for example a file system and an integrated development environment), so VxWorks most probably mean VRTX now Works. As Wind River anticipated that Ready Systems would cancel the contract, they developed their own kernel and put it in VRTX's place, and for this reason the core functionality of VxWorks is suspiciously similar to that of VRTX.
Major features of VxWorks include a fast, multitasking kernel with pre-emptive scheduling and fast interrupt response, extensive intertask communications and synchronization facilities, efficient UNIX-compatible memory management, multiprocessor facilities, a shell for user interface, symbolic and source level debugging capabilities, performance monitoring and an I/O file system.
Because VxWorks is generally used in embedded systems, it requires a host workstation for program development. Unlike "native" systems such as UNIX and QNX, VxWorks development is done on a "host" machine running UNIX or Windows, cross-compiling target software to run on various "target" CPU architectures.
The Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity use the VxWorks operating system running on a PowerPC platform. VxWorks is in use in several other spacecraft, and Boeing Commercial Airplanes intends to use the operating system in their new 787 airliner.
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