Real-Time Operating Systems

In several previous courses, students have been familiarized with small embedded systems capable of real-time multitasking control. This course is about large real-time computer architectures which need operating systems to work properly. In everyday life, we all use well known general purpose operating systems like Windows, Linux or Android, but none of these have real-time capabilities. This means they don't really care about time. In general, they try to respond as fast as possible but they don't tell you in advance how much time they will need for a certain task, let alone guarantee it. 

Suppose we need to control the movement of a robot arm where the response of the entire computer system becomes heavily time constrained. Lest the processing is done within the defined time window, the system fails. With response times in the millisecond range all general purpose operating systems become useless even with huge computation power. Unfortunately, it is not possible to just upgrade them to real-time because their kernel architecture is fundamentally unsuited. This course is focusing on basic structural differences between kernels of general purpose and real-time operating systems.

Understanding contemporary industrial operating systems with multitasking and real-time capabilities. Surveille of modern embedded systems software development products and hands-on project lab work.

Lectures, discussion groups, laboratory project work (group and individual).