BeRTOS is a real-time operating system

Real-time operating system

A real-time operating system is an operating system intended to serve real-time application requests.A key characteristic of a RTOS 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...

 designed for embedded systems.

It is distributed under a modified GPL

GNU General Public License

The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....

 license with a special exception that grants proprietary applications the right to keep their source code closed while maintaining the BeRTOS code itself open.

It has a very modular design, that allows running it on different architectures, ranging from tiny 8-bit microcontrollers like the Atmel AVR

Atmel AVR

The AVR is a modified Harvard architecture 8-bit RISC single chip microcontroller which was developed by Atmel in 1996. The AVR was one of the first microcontroller families to use on-chip flash memory for program storage, as opposed to one-time programmable ROM, EPROM, or EEPROM used by other...

 up to the 32-bit ARM architecture

ARM architecture

ARM is a 32-bit reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by ARM Holdings. It was named the Advanced RISC Machine, and before that, the Acorn RISC Machine. The ARM architecture is the most widely used 32-bit ISA in numbers produced...

, and on hosted environments such as Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

 and Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

.

BeRTOS preemptive multitasking kernel implements many IPC

Inter-process communication

In computing, Inter-process communication is a set of methods for the exchange of data among multiple threads in one or more processes. Processes may be running on one or more computers connected by a network. IPC methods are divided into methods for message passing, synchronization, shared...

 primitives like:

• Signals
  Signal (computing)
  A signal is a limited form of inter-process communication used in Unix, Unix-like, and other POSIX-compliant operating systems. Essentially it is an asynchronous notification sent to a process in order to notify it of an event that occurred. When a signal is sent to a process, the operating system...
  
  
• Semaphores
• Messages
  Message passing
  Message passing in computer science is a form of communication used in parallel computing, object-oriented programming, and interprocess communication. In this model, processes or objects can send and receive messages to other processes...
  
  

In addition to the kernel, BeRTOS provides a hardware abstraction layer that includes large number of peripheral drivers (timer, serial, ADC

Analog-to-digital converter

An analog-to-digital converter is a device that converts a continuous quantity to a discrete time digital representation. An ADC may also provide an isolated measurement...

, motors, LCD display, NTC sensors, keyboard, buzzer, memories), algorithms (hash table

Hash table

In computer science, a hash table or hash map is a data structure that uses a hash function to map identifying values, known as keys , to their associated values . Thus, a hash table implements an associative array...

, CRC

Cyclic redundancy check

A cyclic redundancy check is an error-detecting code commonly used in digital networks and storage devices to detect accidental changes to raw data...

, MD2, entropy pool, RLE

Run-length encoding

Run-length encoding is a very simple form of data compression in which runs of data are stored as a single data value and count, rather than as the original run...

), communication protocols and a graphic windowing subsystem for small displays.

External links

• BeRTOS homepage