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