A WIN32 COMPATIBLE RTOS

Let’s look at one RTOS designed to be Win32 compatible. The On Time Embedded RTOS runs Win32 console-mode applications (programs using printf()-style I/O) on any system with a ’386 or higher CPU.

Its Win32 compatibility can support the complex run-time systems of current Win32 C++ compilers, including C++ language features like exception handling, global and local object construction/destruction, name spaces, and RTTI. It supports Win32 advanced features like uncommitted memory, structured exception handling, thread variables, and DLLs.

Its scalability permits booting and running a complete 32-bit application in just 16 KB of memory (see sidebar). A supplementary native API supplies real-time functionality not available under Win32 alone.

Its foundation is the cross-development system RTTarget-32, which implements the core of the OS. It includes all the development tools needed to run 32-bit applications built with standard Win32 compilers on an embedded target.

The real-time kernel extends RTTarget-32’s Win32 API support with multithread functions, semaphores, and critical sections. RTFiles-32 adds a file system, and RTIP adds a TCP/IP stack (see Figure 2).

.