5. Multitasking Systems – an Introduction
The purpose of this chapter is to describe the basics of multitasking systems by setting out to describe:
- What the tasking model of software is
- The benefits of modeling software as a set of collaborating tasks – a multitasking structure
- How interrupts can be used as a mechanism for implementing concurrency
- What, in general terms, a real-time operating system (RTOS) is and what it does
- How an RTOS can be used as a mechanism for implementing concurrency
- How task execution is controlled – scheduling principles
- Problems that may be met when tasks share resources, and showing how these can be resolved
- Features needed to enable tasks to communicate with each other – inter-task communication
