[...]
> You'll never send an engineer out to replace a set-top-box. You'll just
> wait for the customer to return the box and send out a new one. Software
> doesn't fail on those - it's some 99.9% hardware failure. If you get a
> hang or panic or something, the boxes usually have watchdogs to take care
> of that (and then reboot automatically). The average computer-frightened
> user getting an STB from the VoD/IPTV company (or her ISP) don't want to
> see any kernel gibberish. They just want a nice splash screen telling
> them "everything's gonna be alright in 45 seconds" or something. Trouble
> shooting is done in the lab after the box is returned
Right. And this is a very specialized application, where the vendor will
install a heavily hacked system anyway, as they won't have standard VGA or
keyboard or...
It has no relevance whatsoever to the standard, for-your-typical-box
kernel.
-- Dr. Horst H. von Brand User #22616 counter.li.org Departamento de Informatica Fono: +56 32 654431 Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria +56 32 654239 Casilla 110-V, Valparaiso, Chile Fax: +56 32 797513 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/