Computers as Components, 3rd Edition

6.4 Preemptive Real-Time Operating Systems

A preemptive real-time operating system (RTOS) solves the fundamental problems of a cooperative multitasking system. It executes processes based upon timing requirements provided by the system designer. The most reliable way to meet timing requirements accurately is to build a preemptive operating system and to use priorities to control what process runs at any given time. We will use these two concepts to build up a basic real-time operating system. We will use as our example operating system FreeRTOS [Bar07]. This operating system runs on many different platforms.

6.4.1 Two Basic Concepts

To make our operating system work, we need to simultaneously introduce two basic concepts. First, we introduce ...