Popular real-time operating systems
When selecting an RTOS for a particular real-time embedded system architecture and application domain, it is important to consider a variety of technical and non-technical factors in the selection process. Almost all popular RTOSes support prioritized preemptive multitasking, mutexes, semaphores, queues, event flags, timers, and dynamic memory allocation. All of the RTOSes listed in this section include these features.
Some key technical attributes that differentiate among the various RTOSes are as follows:
- Feature richness: Some RTOSes are intended be as small as possible, consuming the absolute minimum quantity of ROM, RAM, and processor cycles in tiny microcontrollers. Other RTOSes are designed to support a large number of tasks and complex protocol stacks such as TCP/IP running on a 32-bit processor.
- Memory protection and virtual memory management: Simple microcontrollers and low-end microprocessors typically support only direct...