I was in the ED the other day and noticed that they use a mix of Windows 7 and Windows 10. My question is two part.
- Do you know of hospitals using Linux?
- Besides legacy software and unwanted downtime, is there any reason why they wouldn’t use Linux?
I know Linux has little to no penetration in health equipment firmware because a lot if not most of them have hard real-time requirements that Linux just doesn’t quite reach. QNX4 is a real-time Unix flavor that has been used in fancy graphical heartbeat/multi stat monitors. Its microkernel architecture allows for a watchdog to restart individual drivers so it’s more fault tolerant.
Microkernels for the win! Monolithic kernels can be built tiny though, so they are also pretty stable