Now days operating system are available for embedded system. Like Raspberry Pi which has a it's own operating system

But have you ever thought why any operating systems is needed in embedded systems?

 

Hello,

Indeed, the raspberry pi has several operating systems:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/software/operating-systems/

An embedded system needs an operating system to be able to perform the tasks.

Bertus

 

To have access to a massive amount of pre-written code that takes something like security and TCP/IP and takes months off developing and debugging the code.

You also have massive advantages running multiple threads.

 

In your definition of "operating system" I assume that software that is written in assembler is running "without an operating system"?

 

If you just want to do simple IO then you could write something for the PI that is loaded at boot instead of Linux or what not... if you want to actually use USB, video, networking, and anything else you have a long and uphill path to follow.

I do remember the touch screens on most of the machines at a factory I worked at seemed to always boot Windows CE which to me seemed weird. All they were for the most part were touch screens that ran a program to send and receive serial data to and from PLCs. Maybe there's more to it than I think, but it would seem to me something like that would be easy to do with a microcontroller.

I should add some where actual PC type units with all the ports and features that did collect histories, draw graphs, and other "computer" type things.... understandable in those cases.

 

Now days operating system are available for embedded system. Like Raspberry Pi which has a it's own operating system

But have you ever thought why any operating systems is needed in embedded systems?

Yes, I think about it with every project. I only use an ‘operating system’ when my project can benefit from it.

 

An operating system is the central command control of a very complex system.
Can you imagine a human being functioning without a brain? (No snarky responses necessary!)

 

Now days operating system are available for embedded system. Like Raspberry Pi which has a it's own operating system

But have you ever thought why any operating systems is needed in embedded systems?

Its a fact that there's no strict definition of what an operating system actually is.

At the most basic I guess the OS is the software that manages resources so that your own code does not need to be burdened by this duty.

Managing resources is very important when you have more than one app to run and you don't want the code in one app to have to bother with what other apps might be doing, this is likely one of the original motives for operating systems to emerge.

If you have and will only ever have just one program, one app running then the concept of operating systems may well be unnecessary, though you will likely need library functions for doing things that your own code does not do like allocating and freeing memory for example, but that's not strictly an operating system function.

 

A good definition of "Real time" as in real time operating system is a guaranteed response to an event. For complex problems, it's necessary when there are multiple processes etc.

Do, you need an operating system when building a stop watch - no. A microwave - no.

A RTOS may help development of a microwave. You have a display to manage and a keyboard to manage, timing to the microwave power, You have power levels to manage. Certain keys need to do stuff right away. You also have interrupts for errors as well.

Windows is not an RTOS. It wants each process to operate fairly. So, you have pre-emptive multi-tasking.

MAC OS <=9 basically the Multifinder handed off the CPU to another process when it no longer needed the resources or was waiting for keyboard input.

 

Now days operating system are available for embedded system. Like Raspberry Pi which has a it's own operating system

But have you ever thought why any operating systems is needed in embedded systems?

An O/S is not needed on an embedded system- but having one makes writing code for embedded easier because the O/S can offer services to do the 'heavy lifting' you would otherwise have to do- and using an O/S makes the interface uniform so it's the same with any code you write in the app.

 

In short:

1. If you need the services, they are handy to have around.
2. If you don't, you can certainly get by without one.