A Review of Operating System Infrastructure for Real-Time Embedded Software

Since their early applications in the 1960s, embedded systems have come down in price and increased dramatically in processing power and functionality. In addition, embedded systems are becoming increasingly complex. High-end devices, such as mobile phones, PDAs, entertainment devices, and set-top boxes, feature millions of lines of code with varying degrees of assurance of correctness. Nowadays, more and more embedded systems are implementing in a distributed way, and a wide range of high-performance distributed embedded systems have been design and deployed. As many aspects of embedded system design become increasingly dependent on the effective interaction of distributed processors, it is clear that much effort needs to be focus on software infrastructure, such as operating systems, to ensure that they provide functionality to fulfill these requirements. This paper reviews some of the approaches associated with the operating systems used to fulfill these needs.