RTOS extends to support latest Posix specs: News from Green Hills Software

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Posix support in the Integrity RTOS now includes all interfaces and functionality necessary for conformance to the latest, 2003 Posix.1 System Interfaces specification (IEEE1003.1). Demonstrating Green Hills Software's continued commitment to open standards, it has started the process of certifying conformance under the "Posix Certified by the IEEE and The Open Group" programme. Posix defines a standard Linux and Unix compatible interface between application software and an underlying operating system.

The use of Posix allows organisations to leverage their software investment across disparate projects that use different Posix compliant operating systems.

The Integrity RTOS supplements Posix memory protection with secure partitioning, allowing developers to build much more reliable and secure applications than previously possible with Linux and traditional Posix operating systems.

Memory protection only prevents one task from inadvertently corrupting the memory used by another.

Secure partitioning guarantees that each task has the resources needed to run correctly, including memory and processor bandwidth.

This ensures that errant, or malicious tasks, or a denial of service attack, will not result in resource starvation.

"Posix support in the Integrity RTOS is highly optimised for embedded and real-time systems", said David Kleidermacher, Vice President of Engineering for Green Hills Software.

"The Posix memory footprint in the Integrity RTOS is under 150Kbyte, less than one-tenth the memory required by Linux.

And unlike other operating systems that disable interrupts and pre-emption, the Integrity RTOS is able to provably guarantee worst-case interrupt response times in the hundreds of nanoseconds and task switch times of about 1us, several hundred times faster than Linux".

Dan O'Dowd, founder and Chief Executive Officer of Green Hills Software, added: "Manufacturers who embed the Integrity RTOS do not have to disclose their source code, as mandated by the general public licence that governs Linux, nor are they exposed to the risk of intellectual property contamination inherent in Linux".

The Integrity RTOS now provides over 1000 functions that comprise the standard system interfaces, including multiprocessing, threads, signals, file system interfaces, access control, pipes, queues, asynchronous I/O and timers.

Newly added interfaces include fork() and exec(), the standard multiprocessing primitives in Linux and Unix systems.

Most RTOSs lack an analogue to fork() and exec(), making it extremely difficult to port applications not written specifically for an embedded system.

The addition of fork() and exec() to the Integrity RTOS provides developers with a high level of portability for Unix and Linux applications.

For higher performance multiprocessing, the Integrity RTOS also includes the posix_spawn() interface, which was added to the most recent Posix specification.

The posix_spawn() function can usually replace sequential calls to fork() and exec() with a single, much faster operation.

Posix support for the Integrity RTOS is planned for release in April 2004, after Posix certification has been received.

The initial release will support the PowerPC, ARM, XScale, MIPS, x86/Pentium and ColdFire target processors and Windows, Linux, Solaris and HP-UX development hosts.

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