News & Analysis
SOFTWARE TOOLS: Micrium Expands RTOS Family with C/OS-III
Bernard Cole
3/26/2009 3:32 AM EDT
According to Jean Labrosse, president and CEO of Micrium, the new version of the RTOS incorporates such elements as preemptive multitasking, unlimited number of tasks and priorities, and round robin scheduling of tasks at equal priorities.
Micrium will be demonstrating the software at Booth 1844 at the ESC from March 30 through April 2, in San Jose.
He said uC/OS-III represents a natural progression from the original uC/OS-II and "addresses customers' requests to provide certain enhancements that address today's complex designs without sacrificing the existing quality and clean code they're used to."
uC/OS-III is a preemptive multitasking kernel that always runs the most important task that is ready-to-run. It supports an unlimited number of tasks, and allows stack growth of the tasks to be monitored at run-time. It also supports an unlimited number of priority levels. Typically, however, 32 to 256 different priority levels are adequate for most applications.
Specifically useful for today's designs, said Labrosse, is round robin scheduling of tasks at equal priority. "It allows multiple tasks to run at the same priority level, each for a user-specified time period," he said. "Each task can define its own time quanta, and each task can give up a time slice if its full time quanta is not required.
It also allows for an unlimited number of kernel objects such as tasks, semaphores, mutexes, event flags, message queues, timers, and memory partitions. C/OS-III is mostly run-time configurable, said Labrosse.
uC/OS-III provides near zero interrupt disable time and has a number of internal data structures and variables that it needs to access atomically. These critical regions are protected by locking the scheduler instead of disabling interrupts. Interrupts are disabled for almost zero clock cycles, ensuring the RTOS will be able to respond to some of the fastest interrupt sources.
Processor support includes: ARM7/9, Cortex-Mx, Nios-II, PowerPC, Coldfire, i.MX, Microblaze, H8, SH, M16C, M32C, Blackfin, and more. uC/OS-III is provided in ANSI-C source form to licensees. Beta tests are underway in Q2, and product will be available in Q3, 2009. It is priced at $9,995/end-product. To learn more go to www.micrium.com.
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StanM
3/27/2009 10:45 AM EDT
Why is this news? I like uC/OS, it was the first RTOS I used, but almost every other RTOS already has these features, and has had for years (that's why I had to change RTOS's).
The only useful information is the price -the "new" features are part of almost every product, "Almost zero clock cycles" is a meaningless phrase that is misleading, I know it's different for different architectures but I need to know worst case values, and for some architectures&instructions that is nowhere close to "almost zero".
This should be in advertising not news, I expect you to be able to filter out advertising from news in press releases.
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SMc
3/27/2009 3:14 PM EDT
While I learned alot from the original book from Micrium I could not see using the OS for my products because of all the limitations. It is interesting to see Micrium finally catching up with the times but these features arn't anything new as many commercial RTOS ( vxWorks, OSE, ThreadX ) have had these features for years? With all the time and usage on these established products, it will be interesting to see if an essentially new OS can play catch up at this point in time and be successful.
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cpns
3/31/2009 4:24 AM EDT
The name was once changed from uC/OS to MicroC/OS because the pronunciation "mucus" was not regarded as attractive! You have written it uC/OS-III; has it reverted? Can we start calling it "mucus" again? I hope so.
MicroC/OS-II always had obvious similarities to Segger embOS (including embOSView and MicroCOSView being virtually identical other than teh name on teh title bar), except of course that embOS already had all these 'new' features. So is MicroC/OS-III not essentially embOS I wonder?
Note that the embOS licensing model is per developer seat not per product, so that may appeal more to houses with low developer count and fast product turn-around.
Is there a new book associated with this? Can I trade in my old one?
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