Member-only story
The Fundamentals of Real-Time Operating Systems
A brief overview of hard and soft real-time systems
Working in the field of autonomous systems this past couple of years has got me mesmerized over this tiny-huge world called Operating System. To be more specific, it’s the application of a real-time operating system — mainly characterized by predictability and determinism — that I want to zoom in more closely in this article. These two key features separate how we define hard real-time systems from the soft real-time systems.
Why real-time systems
There is a reason why our phone is called a “smart phone”. A phone, a computer, or even a car communicates in 0's and 1's. An operating system (OS) is essentially a program that helps us interact with our computer. A real-time operating system (RTOS), in this case, is an operating system for real-time applications that processes data and events (called processing tasks), in which tasks are repeated and performed within a certain time constraint.
In other words, a real-time operating system (RTOS) is a program where the correctness of computation depends on the timing of the results.
