Microsoft has announced the open-sourcing of the real-time operating system Azure RTOS under the permissive MIT license. This OS was acquired after the acquisition of Express Logic in 2019 and had previously been provided under the name ThreadX for more than 20 years. It is claimed that the OS in question has been installed on over 12 billion devices worldwide, including consumer electronics, industrial systems, medical devices, printers, WiFi chips, and even onboard systems of spacecraft.
After the complete open-sourcing of the code, scheduled for January 2024 (the ThreadX code was available earlier but under a restrictive license), the product will be under the auspices of the Eclipse Foundation and will develop under the name Eclipse ThreadX as an independent collaborative project, unrelated to any specific vendors. It is expected that the transition of the project to an independent platform will attract new contributors to the development and stimulate the growth of the platform and its related ecosystem. Companies such as AMD, Cypherbridge, NXP, PX5, Renesas, ST Microelectronics, Silicon Labs, and Witekio (Avnet) have already expressed their intention to join the collaborative project.
The Eclipse ThreadX operating system has a minimal footprint of only 2 KB, can operate on chips with 1 KB of RAM, provides context switching in microseconds, and has a boot time of 120 processor cycles. ThreadX features include a pico-kernel architecture, preemptive multitasking schedulers (priority-based) and cooperative multitasking, a mechanism for minimizing context switches by disabling task preemption up to a specified priority threshold, event chaining support, a wide range of pluggable system services, very fast interrupt handling, additional optimization for timer interrupt processing, memory management support with MMU/MPU, memory protection, inter-thread communication mechanisms, event notification delivery, thread synchronization mechanisms, and support for mutexes and semaphores.
In addition to the operating system code, Eclipse will open and transfer related components:
- NetX Duo is a networking stack designed for use in real-time systems and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. It supports IPv4, IPv6, TCP, UDP, ICMP, TLS, DTLS, IPsec, PPPoE, DHCP, DNS, HTTP, IGMP, POP3, SMTP, SNMP, MQTT, and CoAP, LWM2M.
- USBX is a USB stack supporting client, host (EHCI, OHCI), and OTG (on-the-go) modes.
- FileX is a file system compatible with FAT (FAT12/16/32 and exFAT) and fully integrable into the ThreadX kernel.
- LevelX is an implementation of the Wear Leveling algorithm for the FileX file system, which extends the lifespan of Flash storage devices.
- GUIX is a library for creating embedded graphical user interfaces.
- GuiX Studio is a design environment that allows users to create graphical elements for the GUIX library and automatically generate C code for execution within the ThreadX environment.
- TraceX is a tracing tool that provides a graphical interface for tracking and analyzing events in real-time.
It supports operation on most popular microcontrollers and processors, including multi-core x86, MIPS, RISC-V, and ARM processors, as well as chips from STM, NXP, Qualcomm, Renesas, Texas Instruments, and Microchip. It provides layers to ensure compatibility with FreeRTOS, POSIX, and OSEK. The system is certified for use in safety-critical systems that require a high level of reliability and is recognized as compliant with the safety and reliability standards IEC 61508, IEC 62304, ISO 26262, EN 50128, and EAL4+ Common Criteria.
Certification-related components are also transferred to the Eclipse organization and will be available under an open license that does not require royalty payments. Existing certifications allow Eclipse ThreadX to be used in chemical manufacturing, oil and gas industry systems, power plants, aerospace, railroads, automotive systems (including engine control chips, driver assistance systems, and autopilots), and medical devices.
Source: opennet.ru
