What is the most popular OS on the planet, in terms of sheer number of systems that use it? Most people would answer some form of Windows, but even if you lump all versions of 32-bit Windows (from Windows 95 through XP) as one, there is still an OS out there that outnumbers it by several fold. Nearly everyone has a device with this OS, even if they don’t know it. It’s VxWorks, by far the most popular embedded RTOS (Real-Time Operating System). It’s used in everything from Cisco routers (which drive the vast majority of the Internet) to such home products as VCRs, “smart” microwave ovens and other appliances, etc. Not even counting your arranger keyboard, you probably already have at least one VxWorks system and don’t even know it!
There are other embedded RTOSes as well, including my personal favorite, QNX. There have also been attempts to squeeze huge hulking desktop OSes down to ROM-embeddable form: Embedded Linux is one such example, and Microsoft has even tried to make and push an Embedded Windows NT and embedded versions of later Windows such as 2000 and XP! But so far there have been few takers.
Could viruses or other malware exist for these OSes? Yes, but it would be much more difficult to write than for OSes such as Windows. For one thing, most of these devices (including most arrangers prior to, say, the PSR8000) store the entire OS in ROM, and that can’t be altered. Some more modern ones use Flash RAM, which can only be altered under special circumstances, so a virus would have to be able to turn on writing to the Flash RAM to store themselves permanently into the device. Otherwise they would vanish as soon as you turned it off! There is also the small matter of how a virus could get into the system in the first place. Very few arranger keyboards actually load programs from floppies (and then only for OS upgrades to the Flash ROM — I suppose someone could post a Web link to a fake upgrade, but you would still have to download it and put it on a floppy and attempt to upgrade your unit with it), and MIDI songs and Wave samples have absolutely no way of embedding programming into them, so a virus couldn’t sneak in that way. (MIDI could be used to reprogram some settings of your keyboard in undesirable ways by using SysExes, but those would usually vanish the next time you power off and back on again, or the device receives a MIDI Reset instruction such as General MIDI System On which appears at the front of most every GM song in existence — devices that allow entering User Programs via MIDI could, I suppose, be vulnerable to MIDI files designed to erase or overwrite them, but if you make backups using a MIDI SysEx filer on your computer coupled with the MIDI Bulk Dump capabilities of your device [or your device’s own floppy drive or hard disk if it has one], even that would only be a minor inconvenience).
[This message has been edited by COMALite J (edited 09-30-2001).]
Previous Topic
Index