Really Free Real-Time Operating Systems
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Although most of the people here are familiar with the use of Linux in various forms in real-time and embedded applications, there are a number of other free real-time alternatives. eCos has been mentioned but RTEMS is the oldest free RTOS. It has been ported to about a dozen CPU families, has TCP/IP, pSOS+ compatability, POSIX threads, ITRON, etc, etc. The source is there, GPL'ed, and there are prebuilt toolsets. See http://www.oarcorp.com/RTEMS.
It is also important to remember that real-time and embedded systems come in many shapes and sizes. Most embedded systems are quite small and very cost-conscious. Embedded a hard drive or
even a flash disk is out of the question. Consider your cell phone, pager, fuel injection system, etc. Those are really quite specific and limited hardware targets where price is king.
Eric Norum has been a long time submitter to the RTEMS project. He is the principal person behind such important submissions as the TCP/IP stack, MC68360 Board Support Package, and TFTP client filesystem. He is currently porting the EPICS package to RTEMS and is porting other open source packages such as GNU libavl and readline as part of this project.
Ralf has been a big submitter to the RTEMS project and I would like to see him recognized. Among numerous other development projects, he has ported RTEMS to the Hitachi SH family, converted much of the RTEMS Makefile structure to GNU automake, and ported other open source packages such as Tcl to RTEMS.
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Although most of the people here are familiar with the use of Linux in various forms in real-time and embedded applications, there are a number of other free real-time alternatives. eCos has been mentioned but RTEMS is the oldest free RTOS. It has been ported to about a dozen CPU families, has TCP/IP, pSOS+ compatability, POSIX threads, ITRON, etc, etc. The source is there, GPL'ed, and there are prebuilt toolsets. See http://www.oarcorp.com/RTEMS. It is also important to remember that real-time and embedded systems come in many shapes and sizes. Most embedded systems are quite small and very cost-conscious. Embedded a hard drive or even a flash disk is out of the question. Consider your cell phone, pager, fuel injection system, etc. Those are really quite specific and limited hardware targets where price is king.
Eric Norum has been a long time submitter to the RTEMS project. He is the principal person behind such important submissions as the TCP/IP stack, MC68360 Board Support Package, and TFTP client filesystem. He is currently porting the EPICS package to RTEMS and is porting other open source packages such as GNU libavl and readline as part of this project.
Ralf has been a big submitter to the RTEMS project and I would like to see him recognized. Among numerous other development projects, he has ported RTEMS to the Hitachi SH family, converted much of the RTEMS Makefile structure to GNU automake, and ported other open source packages such as Tcl to RTEMS.