Development and application of a general low-end embedded operating system

The embedded operating systems have found a wider and wider application with the ongoing development of embedded technology. Because of large scale and high price, commercial embedded operating systems, such as WinCE and VxWorks are usually used in high-performance embedded system. There are also some open-source embedded operating systems like KeiIRTX51 and ucOSII in low-end application field. But those free embedded systems are usually for particular use and difficult to be cross-platform ported. This paper presents a design and implementation of a general low-end embedded operating system, which is 100 percent written in C Language. It provides task scheduling, message mechanism, memory management and some other basic functions, and is characterized as small scale, portability, real-time and reliability. Furthermore, a project example is given out to illustrate the method of cross-platform porting and application of the embedded operating system.