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Blue Screens Of Death On The Red Planet
from the adding-a-little-color dept
The folks behind the Mars Rovers have been giving out a few more details about some of the technical problems they had with the rovers early on. It turns out that in using the DOS file system, the rover's memory wasn't properly deleting image files in the directory after they had been downloaded -- believing its memory was full when it should have seen the images as deleted and been overwriting them. This lack of memory available caused the computers to do what many of us have experienced when running low on memory: freeze and reboot. Luckily, a little bit of quick DOS programming uploaded to the rover solved the problem.
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no DOS programming
It was a FAT filesystem implementation running under VxWorks. The change was a VxWorks routine. Probably it was a big in the VxWorks FAT support (I consider VxWorks to be a rats nest of bugs anyway, unless it's gotten an inconceivably lot better in the past couple of years!).
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