Overview

As discussed in the main FSW tutorial page, the flight software runs as a set of VxWorks "tasks". These are analogous to Unix processes, but they share a common address space. In practice, however, FSW tasks communicate with each other via (possibly inter-machine) message queues.

Some FSW responsibilities are divided up between "master" and "slave" tasks. The master tasks (located on the SIU, because of its privileged position) receive and queue commands; the slave tasks actually do the work.