AVRILOS Files

AVRILOS Readme File

What is it?

AVRILOS is a simple Operating System Framework for embedded systems that allows rapid development of applications. It was written initially for the AVR family but can be ported to other architectures easily enough. This OS unlike the trend does not use pre-emptive multitasking but instead it has a round-robin task cooperative kernel.

Some Details:
As memory was limited and I did not need the complexity of preemptive multitasking the philosophy of this OS is that each task checks if it has any input to process, if there is something to do it just executes otherwise it returns to the round-robin main. The advantage is that this is very scalable and you don't worry for complex things, it is very efficient for RAM and also there is no context switch so you save execution time. The drawback of course is that the worst case execution (all tasks execute) should be small enough (preferably less than the system tick period), but this depend from your application! You might be able to break this rule for once in a while. However I am avoiding doing that and I believe for most projects the timing of this loop should not be problem. 

Tools:
The project is based on makefiles. So you will need GCC (Cross-compiler) for your environment plus any tools you are using for debugging your AVR Projects. Also i AVRILOS contains a small monitor application that can be activated at run-time in order to debug real-time problems in actual systems more easily.

Documentation:
I have released AVRILOS to the general public through the www.codeproject.com:

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/system/avrilos.aspx
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/system/fpgaflow.aspx
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/system/Avrilos03b.aspx

Also you may check my personal site: www.ilialex.gr


License:
AVRILOS is free to use in any project hobby/commercial. The only restriction is to support community by contributing code for new peripherals or devices (which are not special purpose or trade secrets of course) to its libraries.

License of AVRILOS is CDDL (see relative license files). 
However some tools i provided may have a different license (ie. CPOL).

About the Author:
For many years i was doing various embedded projects (i started from the "old" 80C51) for more than 10 years. I almost immediately realised that a small OS with serial port and a timer is something that i always wanted on every system. Back then i was writting in assembly language. Over the years i reverted to C and after again many years i decided to contibute to the open source community my small piece of technology. I like it because it is simple, small and configurable. 
You can contact me through my site at: www.ilialex.gr