In 1997, NASA’s Pathfinder encountered a critical issue.
System resets kept wiping out mission data before it could be transmitted back to earth.
The culprit? Priority Inversion.
It's a classic computer science problem that threatened a $200 Million dollar project.
System resets kept wiping out mission data before it could be transmitted back to earth.
The culprit? Priority Inversion.
It's a classic computer science problem that threatened a $200 Million dollar project.
Comments
The VxWorks operating system on the rover mistakenly didn't have priority inheritance enabled.
Without it, medium-priority tasks could trap high-priority ones indefinitely.
Even the smartest teams can make mistakes when it comes to concurrency!
Check out my video on the santa claus problem to learn more about concurrency issues!