Introduction

Author:

RT-Thread Development Team

Version:

0.2.3

RT-Thread is an open source RTOS and is designed specifically for small memory footprint platforms. The real-time and embedded characters are the most significant advantages of RT-Thread.

• Real-Time Character

RT-Thread is a real-time operating system kernel, with fully preempted multi-thread scheduler, inter-thread communication with timing sensitivity and transparent interrupt handling.

• Embedded Character

RT-Thread is suitable for embedded systems for small footprint characters. The kernel is implemented as a simple C library. The simplest application costs less than 8 Kbytes on the ARM7TDMI platform.

Kernel Architecture

RT-Thread kernel 0.2.3 is a mono kernel, or macro kernel actually. Current system architecture is like:

Figure 1: Mono Kernel System Architecture

Kernel API

The Kernel APIs are the core APIs of RT-Thread, which supports the following features:

• Multi-thread management and scheduler
• Synchronization mechanisms, semaphore and mutex
• Inter-thread communication, event/fast event, mailbox and message queue
• Memory management, memory pool and heap memory management
• Asynchronous timer

For more details, please refer to RT-Thread Kernel API

System Initialization

Once RT-Thread operating system starts up, the facility in system must be initialized firstly.

For more details, please refer to System Initialization