Brief Overview of RTKER

We have carefully studied some of the existing RTOSes, adopted features from them and introduced some of our own ideas into the design of our RTOS - RTKER .

Figure 1.1: RTKER 's Block Diagram

We have developed a basic kernel with support for threads, semaphores & real time interrupt handling. RTKER has also a minimal C library (printf/malloc) for x86 architecture. 1.2 is the block diagram of rtker showinf its important components. The main features of the RTKER are

• Modularity

  We have made the RTKER extremely modular. there are a clear set of functions defined for doing jobs like thread, semaphore, scheduling management and context switching. It has a driectory based separtaion of cpu/architecture dependent code from the architecture independentt code. This modular struture also makes RTKER easily portable.

• Pluggable Scheduler

  We have defined a new concept of a scheduling API. RTKER schedules threads using a scheduler object which has functions like sched_create_thread(), sched_heir_thread(). Application developer can either chose from a predefined set of schedulers (like fifo, edf) or define the scheduler object himself and thus optimize on algorithms and data structures used for scheduling.

• Two Stage Interupt Handling

  Since RTKER caters to the demands of a real time computing environment, it should respond immediately to interrupts. This leads to a two level handling of interrupts - the (fast) immediate interrupt handling function and a second half interrupt handling function which runs with a thread context.

• Device Support

  RTKER has borrowed oskit's device driver framework which enables it to support a large variety of devices. Presently it has drivers for VGA, EEpro100 ethernet card and BTTV Frame grabber card on the x86 architecture.