Introduction

The aim of this project was to design a Real Time Kernel wth the following characteristics

1. Low Overheads in terms of time,code size
2. Ease of portability to other CPU architectures

For ease of portability, it was very important of have a modular design, in which the hardware(CPU/board) dependent code is clearly isolated from the hardware independent code. This is the underlying framework of our implementation. The following diagram illustrates the framework.

Figure 8.1: rtker design framework

The thread and the semaphore libraries are totally hardware independent. They interact with the hardware dependent code through three functions and some macros. By just defining those functions and macros for a particular CPU architecture/board we can get a port of our basic kernel to that architecture. We have tested our framework by porting the rtker to three class of CPI architectures.

Porting however also requires some additional activities, like writing the boot up code, developing device drivers, writing a basic C library etc.