Live Q&A - Understanding RTOSs in 45 minutes
Thank you.
Great overview, highly recommended!
Thank you.
Great presentation! This is incredibly helpful to beginners starting RTOS, will definitely re-watch this and take notes. How often do RTOS "distros" (is that what they are called?) get a new version? Are there ever any difficulties updating a system to run on the new version of RTOS?
Erin,
Like I mention in the Q&A, my golden rule has always been that upgrades should be transparent and if changes are needed to the application, there should be a very clear document that describes how to go from the old to the new version. Also, APIs should never be changed. Case in point, years ago, my team wanted to change the definition of how to specify the size of a stack from 'stack units' (4 bytes on an ARM) to bytes. That was totally out of question and we never implemented this change. Just imagine if the person upgrading to the latest software doesn't change the size of the stack to accommodate bytes from 4-byte entities. You specify a stack of 256 stack units (i.e. 1024 bytes) and now it means 256 bytes? Disastrous!
As for releases, typically between 6 and 18 months. That being said, a well designed RTOS doesn't need to be updated very often unless new capabilities are added. Again, backwards compatibility is the prime directive!
Fantastic presentation Jean, I particularly liked your graphical representation approach to explaining the software concepts.