Editorial 3Q98
RTOS Evaluations
Long expected … here they are!
For
quite some time now, a series of "benchmarks" have been available for some
RTOS. Most of these benchmarks limit the discussion to measurements of interrupt
latencies and task switch latency without any mention of the system's workload.
The published figures from different sources are hardly comparable, due to
a lack of a common testing environment. Therefore, Real-Time Magazine started
to deal with it in a more systematic way in 1995. Initially, the project
was not a big success. A questionnaire mailed to our readers showed that
almost nobody wanted to pay for this. We continued working on it "in slow
motion" and discovered how difficult it was to define the test suites.
The real story actually started in 1997 when some customers wished to use
Microsoft OS technology in real-time environments and asked for a survey.
This helped us to relaunch the initial project, but this time we decided
to call it an RTOS evaluation project, rather than a benchmark project
evaluation" project. The practical experience from the customers' projects
helped us to clearly define what is needed in an evaluation. To know all
about it, read our article "RTOS Evaluations Kick Off" in this issue.
Our articles, published in the
97Q2
issue of this magazine and on our
website had such a tremendous success, that we decided to dedicate this
whole issue to the topic!
In industry, more and more people want to use Microsoft Windows OS technology to get openness at every level.
There are several reasons for this:
-
The Win32 API becomes a de facto standard and a great amount of software is available for it.
-
If the available software is of no use for the application, one can rely on a large number of software engineers who are familiar with the Win32 API.
-
The graphical user interface is so popular that only a few (1?) competitors are left now.
-
NT has a lot of ready to go solutions for communication issues (both hardware and software), especially in a PCI environment.
-
All kinds of development tools are available for the Windows NT environment, and it is convenient to have the same environment for both business and industrial applications.
-
Industrial systems are now seamlessly integrated with the business systems. By using Microsoft OS technology, the integration and communication between these two worlds is easy.
All these reasons pushed people to experiment with the Microsoft Windows OS for dedicated systems. The importance of the dedicated market has been recognised by Microsoft via the introduction of Windows CE. Although Windows NT and CE are not yet true RTOSs, some embedded applications with low real-time constraints are using them already. Moreover,
hard real-time applications can be addressed via Real-Time extensions to NT
made available now by different vendors and by the availability of CE 3.0 in 1999. This issue contains the preliminary results of our RTOS Evaluations of both CE 2.0 and NT RT Extensions. The final results will be made available through the website in Q4 this year.
Dr Martin Timmerman