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Exactly When Do You Need an RTOS?




February 2012
7 pages
Exactly When Do You Need an RTOS?

Together, the speed of today’s high-performance processors and realtime patches for general-purpose OSs appear to have re-opened the question of whether embedded systems still need an RTOS. The answer hasn’t changed: the guarantees only a true RTOS can offer on relatively low-end processors mean that these OSs are here to stay in embedded environments.

Contents

Introduction — RTOSs Aren't "Fair" — Preemptible Kernel — Mechanisms to Avoid Priority Inversion — Partitioning Schedulers for Guaranteed CPU Availability — "Dualing" Kernels — Extending the RTOS for Application-specific Requirements — A Strategic Decision [+]





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Author
Paul Leroux
paull@qnx.com

Paul Leroux

Paul Leroux is an award-winning writer, technology analyst, and public relations manager. He has been with QNX Software Systems for more than 20 years, where he is particularly valued for his knowledge of the embedded industry and for his ability to explain complex technical issues to both specialists and non-specialists.

Leroux maintains the blog On Q, which he describes as "a personal mashup of QNX, cars, embedded systems, M2M, and photography."

When he is not writing whitepapers or blogging, Leroux is an avid snowshoer and wildlife photographer. He holds a B.A. and an M.A., both from Concordia University in Montreal.

See Also...

Processor Affinity or Bound Multiprocessing: Easing the Migration to Embedded Multicore Processing

Memory Errors in Embedded Systems

Using an IEC 61508-Certified RTOS Kernel for Safety-Critical Systems

The Joy of Scheduling

Meeting Security Certification Requirements with Certicom and QNX

An Introduction to QNX Transparent Distributed Processing


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