Embedded OS RTEMS Turns 21

joelsherrill writes "RTEMS is a free real-time operating system for embedded systems. The project is celebrating the 21st birthday of RTEMS today. RTEMS supports the single process with filesystem POSIX profile on over a dozen processor architectures. To just be entering young adulthood, RTEMS has had a busy life. It has been a Google Summer of Code project twice (Thanks Google!). It has been to Venus on the Venus Express, circles Mars on the Electra radio, powers Herschel and Planck, is on its way to the asteroid belt aboard DAWN, and has been a key part of physics discoveries at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center."

Brace yourself...

[nuckfuts]

for the inevitable comparisons to Linux. And yes, we've heard of embedded Linux.

Re:Brace yourself...

[joelsherrill]

RTEMS targets a different POSIX profile than GNU/Linux. RTEMS provides a single process, multi-threaded environment with either constant or predictable execution times for nearly every service. A small RTEMS system would be 64Kb total code and data space but that would not be the smallest possible. A large RTEMS system with BSP TCP/IP, filesystem, webserver, and telnetd will fit into less than 512Kb code space. This is tiny, if not impossible, for a GNU/Linux system.

Re:Congrats, Joel!

[joelsherrill]

Jake.. 2009 was one of the most active years yet. The Google Summer of Code students were absolutely wonderful. I have pushed on test coverage to get as close as possible to 100%. Santosh was the GSoC student who worked with me and we got test reports near 100% on 5 target architectures (x86, sparc, powerpc, arm, and m68k/coldfire).