Embedded Operating System

Multitasking RTOS
Using Multitasking
Memory Management

Multitasking Real-Time Operating System

All Mosaic controllers run a built-in Real-Time Operating System (RTOS). This system implements cooperative and time-sliced multitasking, provides resource locking and mailbox services, implements an efficient paged memory manager, traps and reports errors, handles interrupts, and autostarts your application at system startup. By following some simple coding practices as shown in the documented coding examples, you can take advantage of these sophisticated features without having to worry about the implementation details.

The QED real-time operating system delivers workstation- caliber tools to your embedded control application. The onboard development software provides resources to initialize the system, manage multiple tasks in real time, dynamically allocate memory, and automatically execute your application program.

Using Multitasking

An instrument control program can typically be broken down into a number of tasks, each of which performs a distinct function.
For example, many programs perform data acquisition, computation, communications, control, and user interface functions.

Grouping these functions as separate modularly coded tasks has two key advantages.

First, each task may have its own timing behavior.
For example, you may want to collect data ten times per second, print out average readings once per second, and scan the touchpad for events as often as possible to provide a responsive front-panel user interface.

By coding separate tasks for data collection, printing, and user interface management, the RTOS ensures that each task uses a minimum of processor time without running inefficient timing loops.

Second, task-oriented coding results in clean modular source code that is easy to debug and maintain.

An integrated real-time operating system implements cooperative and/or pre-emptive (timesliced) multitasking with only 30 μsec task switch time. Resource variables and mailboxes handle inter-task communication and resource sharing.

Memory Management

All Mosaic controllers incorporate paged memory to greatly expand the available memory space beyond the 64K native address range of the processor. The IDE provides templates that set up ample memory maps for your code (in non-volatile flash memory) and data structures (in RAM). The real time operating system seamlessly handles page changes at runtime, so you can treat the memory as contiguous.

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