The objective of this workpackage is to make a study of the state of the art of real-time technology which is made available by the research community, and to determine what types of mechanisms actually turn out to be most useful for real-time applications. In concrete, this workpackage will analyse the real-time operating systems (RTOS) features and extract the main characteristics that will be included in the OCERA development.
The project is to produce and integrate prototypes of various innovative real-time techniques, research areas of particular interest include scheduling, resource management, fault-tolerance and communication with real-time constraints, which are identified as the key elements to provide predictable and high performance distributed real-time operating systems.
RTOS is a generic term for a set of operating systems that provide support for real-time applications. There is a wide range of RTOS, from the small and simple enough to fit in a few kilobytes of memory that can run on simple processors, to the high-end range RTOS that provides full graphical user interface that require several megabytes of RAM and powerful processors (MMU, protected mode, etc.).
Originally, Linux was designed to be used in a server or desktop environment. Since then, Linux has evolved and grow to be used in almost all the computer areas, among others, in embedded systems, parallel clusters, realtime systems, etc.
There is a large group of researchers, hackers and companies adding realtime capabilities: reducing the memory requirement, porting Linux to embedded processors, improving the response time, etc. Real Time Linux is just another piece of software developed in a Open-Source development methodology. There is not a single company or research group that concentrates all the development of realtime Linux, but a set of not connected, overlapped or even rival implementations are taking place simultaneously.
The two main contributions of this working package are:
A list of features that are available in commercial RTOS.
A detailed description of the real-time features already implemented in Linux. Features that are included in the Linux kernel by default or that are distributed separately.
The rest of this deliverable is organised as follows: In the first part a summary of the POSIX and OSEK standard followed by the list of main features we are interested and are taken into consideration in the RTOS analysis. Several summary tables are presented in the last section of the fist part. In the second part of the deliverable a study of each RTOS is presented.
The conclusions of this deliverable can be found in the deliverable D3.2 "Functionality Not Available in Open RTOS" of the Workpackage 3 "Market Analysis".