RTOS - Real Time Operating System

RTOS Architecture
For simpler applications, RTOS is usually a kernel but as complexity increases, various modules like networking protocol stacks debugging facilities, device I/Os are includes in addition to the kernel.
The general architecture of RTOS is shown in the fig. 
RTOS Architecture
A)    Kernel
RTOS kernel acts as an abstraction layer between the hardware and the applications. There are three broad categories of kernels  
·         Monolithic kernel
Monolithic kernels are part of Unix-like operating systems like Linux, FreeBSD etc. A monolithic kernel is one single program that contains all of the code necessary to perform every kernel related task. It runs all basic system services (i.e. process and memory management, interrupt handling and I/O communication, file system, etc) and provides powerful abstractions of the underlying hardware. Amount of context switches and messaging involved are greatly reduced which makes it run faster than microkernel.
·         Microkernel  
It runs only basic process communication (messaging) and I/O control. It normally provides only the minimal services such as managing memory protection, Inter process communication and the process management. The other functions such as running the hardware processes are not handled directly by microkernels.  Thus, micro kernels provide a smaller set of simple hardware abstractions. It is more stable than monolithic as the kernel is unaffected even if the servers failed (i.e.File System). Microkernels are part of the operating systems like AIX, BeOS, Mach, Mac OS X, MINIX, and QNX. Etc  
·         Hybrid Kernel
Hybrid kernels are extensions of microkernels with some properties of monolithic kernels. Hybrid kernels are similar to microkernels, except that they include additional code in kernel space so that such code can run more swiftly than it would were it in user space. These are part of the operating systems such as Microsoft Windows NT, 2000 and XP. DragonFly BSD, etc  
·         Exokernel 
Exokernels provides efficient control over hardware. It runs only services protecting the resources (i.e. tracking the ownership, guarding the usage, revoking access to resources, etc) by providing low-level interface for library operating systems and leaving the management to the application.
Six types of common services are shown in the following figure below and explained in subsequent sections 

RTOS Services

 

Comments (2)

 Thanx for introducing such

Submitted by ukanth19 on Tue, 20/12/2011 - 10:20.

 

Thanx for introducing such new topic in this website:)

 

Which one among different types of RTOS is best suitable for automotive application??

I WANT MATERIAL FOR REAL TIME

Submitted by ijelectronics on Mon, 14/05/2012 - 22:22.

I WANT MATERIAL FOR REAL TIME OPERATING SYSTEM.ALSO WANT EBOOK.SEND LINK