A new open source RTOS named Atomthreads has had its first release last month. UK based developer Kelvin Lawson, who is a professional embedded systems developer wrote the RTOS during his spare time.
Atomthreads is a free, lightweight, portable, real-time scheduler for embedded systems.
It is released under the flexible, open source BSD license and is free to use for commercial or educational purposes without restriction.
It is targeted at systems that need only a scheduler and the usual RTOS primitives. No file system, IP stack or device drivers are included, but developers can bolt on their own as required. Atomthreads will always be a small number of C files which are easy to port to any platforms that require threading by adding a simple architecture-specific file.
Features
- OS Features
- Preemptive scheduler with 255 priority levels
- Round-robin at same priority level
- Semaphore
- Mutex
- Queue
- Timers
- Lightweight: the entire operating system fits into a few C files
- Highly portable ANSI C code not tied to any compiler
- Easy to read, well-documented, doxygen-commented code
- Can be ported to any CPU architecture with a single architecture-specific module
- Automated test suite proves reliable kernel operation
- Free and flexible open source, BSD-licensed code
- Readable code provides a good platform for learning RTOS internals
The release contains a port to the Atmel AVR architecture. The next port is likely to be ARM7 and plans for other architectures are in progress.
An initial port is available for the Atmel AVR/ATmega architecture, with additional ports in development including 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit architectures.
Visit Atomthreads to download the source code for free and obtain further information.
