A 

real-time operating system (RTOS) is an operating system (OS) intended for real-time applications. Such

operating systems serve application requests nearly real-time. A real-time operating system offers programmers

more control over process priorities. An application's process priority level may exceed that of a system process.

Real-time operating systems minimize critical sections of system code, so that the application's interruption is nearly

critical.

A key characteristic of a real-time OS is the level of its consistency concerning the amount of time it takes to accept

and complete an application's task; the variability is jitter. A hard real-time operating system has less jitter than

a soft real-time operating system. The chief design goal is not high throughput, but rather a guarantee of a soft or

hard performance category. A real-time OS that can usually or generallymeet a deadline is a soft real-time OS, but if

it can meet a deadline deterministically it is a hard real-time OS.

A real-time OS has an advanced algorithm for scheduling. Scheduler flexibility enables a wider, computer-system

orchestration of process priorities, but a real-time OS is more frequently dedicated to a narrow set of applications.

Key factors in a real-time OS are minimal interrupt latency and minimal thread switching latency, but a real-time OS is

valued more for how quickly or how predictably it can respond than for the amount of work it can perform in a given

period of time.

Contents

 [hide]

1 Design philosophies

2 Scheduling

o 2.1 Algorithms

3 Intertask communication and resource sharing

o 3.1 Temporarily masking/disabling interrupts

o 3.2 Binary semaphores

 3.2.1 Binary semaphores in existing real-time operating

systems

o 3.3 Message passing

4 Interrupt handlers and the scheduler

5 Memory allocation

6 Examples

7 See also

8 References

[edit]Design philosophies
Two basic designs exist:

 Event-driven which switches tasks only when an event of higher priority needs service, called preemptive

priority, or priority scheduling.

 Time-sharing designs switch tasks on a regular clock interrupt, and on events, called round robin.

Time-sharing designs switch tasks more often than strictly needed, but give smoother, more

deterministic multitasking, giving the illusion that a process or user has sole use of a machine.

Early CPU designs needed many cycles to switch tasks, during which the CPU could do nothing else useful. For

example, with a 20 MHz68000 processor (typical of late 1980s), task switch times are roughly 20 microseconds. (In

contrast, a 100 MHz ARM CPU (from 2008) switches in less than 3 microseconds.)[1][2] Because of this, early OSes

tried to minimize wasting CPU time by avoiding unnecessary task switching.

[edit]Scheduling

In typical designs, a task has three states: 1) running (executing on the CPU), 2) ready (ready to be executed), 3)

blocked (waiting for input/output). Most tasks are blocked or ready most of the time because generally only one task

can run at a time per CPU. The number of items in the ready queue can greatly vary, depending on the number of

tasks the system needs to perform and the type of scheduler that the system uses. On simpler non-preemptive but

still multitasking systems, a task has to give up its time on the CPU to other tasks, which can cause the ready queue

to have a greater number of overall tasks in the ready to be executed state (see: [| Resource Starvation])

Usually the data structure of the ready list in the scheduler is designed to minimize the worst-case length of time

spent in the scheduler's critical section, during which preemption is inhibited, and, in some cases, all interrupts are

disabled. But the choice of data structure depends also on the maximum number of tasks that can be on the ready

list.

If there are never more than a few tasks on the ready list, then a doubly linked list of ready tasks is likely optimal. If

the ready list usually contains only a few tasks but occasionally contains more, then the list should be sorted by

priority. That way, finding the highest priority task to run does not require iterating through the entire list. Inserting a

task then requires walking the ready list until reaching either the end of the list, or a task of lower priority than that of

the task being inserted.

Care must be taken not to inhibit preemption during this search. Longer critical sections should be divided into small

pieces. If an interrupt occurs that makes a high priority task ready during the insertion of a low priority task, that high

priority task can be inserted and run immediately before the low priority task is inserted.

The critical response time, sometimes called the flyback time, is the time it takes to queue a new ready task and

restore the state of the highest priority task to running. In a well-designed RTOS, readying a new task will take 3 to 20

instructions per ready-queue entry, and restoration of the highest-priority ready task will take 5 to 30 instructions.
In more advanced systems, real-time tasks share computing resources with many non-real-time tasks, and the ready

list can be arbitrarily long. In such systems, a scheduler ready list implemented as a linked list would be inadequate.

[edit]Algorithms

Some commonly used RTOS scheduling algorithms are:

 Cooperative scheduling

 Preemptive scheduling

 Round-robin scheduling

 Fixed priority pre-emptive scheduling, an implementation of preemptive time slicing

 Fixed-Priority Scheduling with Deferred Preemption

 Fixed-Priority Non-preemptive Scheduling

 Critical section preemptive scheduling

 Static time scheduling

 Earliest Deadline First approach

 Advanced scheduling using the stochastic and MTG

Multitasking systems must manage sharing data and hardware resources among multiple tasks. It is usually "unsafe"

for two tasks to access the same specific data or hardware resource simultaneously. "Unsafe" means the results are

inconsistent or unpredictable. There are three common approaches to resolve this problem:

[edit]Temporarily masking/disabling interrupts

General-purpose operating systems usually do not allow user programs to mask (disable) interrupts, because the

user program could control the CPU for as long as it wishes. Modern CPUs don't allow user mode code to disable

interrupts as such control is considered a key operating system resource. Many embedded systems and RTOSs,

however, allow the application itself to run in kernel mode for greatersystem call efficiency and also to permit the

application to have greater control of the operating environment without requiring OS intervention.

On single-processor systems, if the application runs in kernel mode and can mask interrupts, often interrupt

disablement is the best (lowest overhead) solution to prevent simultaneous access to a shared resource. While

interrupts are masked, the current task has exclusive use of the CPU since no other task or interrupt can take control,

so the critical section is protected. When the task exits its critical section, it must unmask interrupts; pending

interrupts, if any, will then execute. Temporarily masking interrupts should only be done when the longest path

through the critical section is shorter than the desired maximum interrupt latency, or else this method increases the

system's maximum interrupt latency. Typically this method of protection is used only when the critical section is just a
few instructions and contains no loops. This method is ideal for protecting hardware bit-mapped registers when the

bits are controlled by different tasks.

[edit]Binary semaphores

When the critical section is longer than a few source code lines or involves lengthy looping, an embedded/real-time

algorithm must resort to using mechanisms identical or similar to those available on general-purpose operating

systems, such as semaphores and OS-supervised interprocess messaging. Such mechanisms involve system calls,

and usually invoke the OS's dispatcher code on exit, so they typically take hundreds of CPU instructions to execute,

while masking interrupts may take as few as one instruction on some processors. But for longer critical sections,

there may be no choice; interrupts cannot be masked for long periods without increasing the system's interrupt

latency.

A binary semaphore is either locked or unlocked. When it is locked, tasks must wait for the semaphore to unlock. A

binary semaphore is therefore equivalent to a mutex. Typically a task will set a timeout on its wait for a semaphore.

There are several well-known problems with semaphore based designs such as priority inversion and deadlocks.

In priority inversion a high priority task waits because a low priority task has a semaphore. A typical solution is to

have the task that owns a semaphore run at (inherit) the priority of the highest waiting task. But this simplistic

approach fails when there are multiple levels of waiting: task A waits for a binary semaphore locked by task B, which

waits for a binary semaphore locked by task C. Handling multiple levels of inheritance without introducing instability in

cycles is complex and problematic.

In a deadlock, two or more tasks lock semaphores without timeouts and then wait forever for the other task's

semaphore, creating a cyclic dependency. The simplest deadlock scenario occurs when two tasks alternately lock

two semaphores, but in the opposite order. Deadlock is prevented by careful design or by having floored

semaphores, which pass control of a semaphore to the higher priority task on defined conditions.

[edit]Binary semaphores in existing real-time operating systems

Operating
Protocol Details
system

Priority
uC/OS-II Addresses priority inversion, but suffers from chained blocking and deadlock.
Ceiling

[edit]Message passing

The other approach to resource sharing is for tasks to send messages in an organized message passing scheme. In

this paradigm, the resource is managed directly by only one task. When another task wants to interrogate or

manipulate the resource, it sends a message to the managing task. Although their real-time behavior is less crisp

than semaphore systems, simple message-based systems avoid most protocol deadlock hazards, and are generally
better-behaved than semaphore systems. However, problems like those of semaphores are possible. Priority

inversion can occur when a task is working on a low-priority message and ignores a higher-priority message (or a

message originating indirectly from a high priority task) in its incoming message queue. Protocol deadlocks can occur

when two or more tasks wait for each other to send response messages.

[edit]Interrupt handlers and the scheduler

Since an interrupt handler blocks the highest priority task from running, and since real time operating systems are

designed to keep thread latency to a minimum, interrupt handlers are typically kept as short as possible. The interrupt

handler defers all interaction with the hardware as long as possible; typically all that is necessary is to acknowledge

or disable the interrupt (so that it won't occur again when the interrupt handler returns). The interrupt handler then

queues work to be done at a lower priority level, such as unblocking a driver task through releasing a semaphore or

sending a message. A scheduler often provides the ability to unblock a task from interrupt handler context.

An OS maintains catalogs of objects it manages such as threads, mutexes, memory, and so on. Updates to this

catalog must be strictly controlled. For this reason it can be problematic when an interrupt handler calls an OS

function while the application is in the act of also doing so. The OS function called from an interrupt handler could find

the object database to be in an inconsistent state because of the application's update. There are two major

approaches to deal with this problem: the unified architecture and the segmented architecture. RTOSs implementing

the unified architecture solve the problem by simply disabling interrupts while the internal catalog is updated. The

downside of this is that interrupt latency increases, potentially losing interrupts. The segmented architecture does not

make direct OS calls but delegates the OS related work to a separate handler. This handler runs at a higher priority

than any thread but lower than the interrupt handlers. The advantage of this architecture is that it adds very few

cycles to interrupt latency. As a result, OSes which implement the segmented architecture are more predictable and

can deal with higher interrupt rates compared to the unified architecture.

[edit]Memory allocation

Memory allocation is more critical in an RTOS than in other operating systems.

First, speed of allocation is important. A standard memory allocation scheme scans a linked list of indeterminate

length to find a suitable free memory block. This is unacceptable in an RTOS since memory allocation has to occur

within a certain amount of time.

The simple fixed-size-blocks algorithm works quite well for simple embedded systems because of its low overhead.

See memory allocation for more details.