Open-Source Real-Time Operating Systems
Wither VxWorks?
Till Straumann
The success of the
Linux OS and the near dominance of the real-time operating system (RTOS) market
by VxWorks has sparked a wide spread interest in a similarly open-sourced RTOS.
In anticipation of the emergence of such OS, the EPICS system has been recently modified to run on top of an
operating system independent (OSI) layer. This should ease the task of porting
the package to other systems than VxWorks when a suitable one has been
identified.
While designing the
software for a power-supply controller for SPEAR3 (MPC860 PowerPC) Till
Straumann explored two open-sourced RTOS: RTLinux and RTEMS. RTEMS is
particularly attractive as Eric Norum of Canadian Light Source has ported the
latest version of EPICS to run on RTEMS. See http://cls.usask.ca/Tech/EPICS_RTEMS/Intro.html for
more details on EPICS and RTEMS.
Till has been able to
run RTLinux on a FADS (MPC860) board and
RTEMS on both the
FADS and an MVME2307. He will give an introduction on the basic features and
differences of these two RTOS.
Thursday April 12, 2001
MCC Conference Room
2:00 PM