Just a quick post on operating systems used in satellite surveillance, which are the most stable in the world.
The
most reliable operating systems tend to be mission-critical OSes that a lot of people arent familiar with, like RODOS, an
operating system designed for satellites and space probes, and
VxWorks,
the operating system NASA uses for the Mars Pathfinder and Curiosity
rovers.
These operating systems are designed
with three primary features: reliability, reliability, and reliability.
Every line is hand-traced and hand-checked multiple times, so as you can
imagine they're very expensive to develop.
They’re
also incredibly robust, designed not only for reliability but also to
tolerate things that bring most other OSes to their knees, such as
memory corruption or other hardware failures.
The
next most reliable operating systems are mainframe operating systems
like z/OS (IBM’s operating system for their z Systems mainframe) and COS
(a batchmode operating system for Cray supercomputers).
RODOS is usually often used in highly secretive satellite surveillance centers which can monitor and manipulate huge numbers of individuals simultaneously.
Recently,
India launched over 100 satellites into orbit to be used in surveillance and monitoring of individuals and there are many more which have been in existence by other countries. Operating systems like RODOS and VxWorks are a major component in the operating and control of these.