RTOS Eyes Fault Tolerance And Safety-Critical Applications

Oct. 27, 2003

Aviation systems demand a lot from a real-time operating system (RTOS), but BAE Systems' CsLeos seems ready for the challenge. Designed from the ground up to meet the requirements of the DO-178B Level A certification, CsLeos also supports the robust ARINC-653 application programming interface (API). This allows the RTOS to host mission-critical applications in a wide range of environments where safety and reliability are top priorities.

CsLeos supports the OpenGL standard. This suits it for applications that require 3D graphics in a secure and stable environment when combined with CsLeos' partitioning system, which supports multiple partition schedules.

Also, CsLeos' wide range of features is key to developing complex systems. The multichannel synchronization provides tight application interaction on the order of 25 µs. In addition, it supports a fast channel restart that's critical when subsecond fault recovery is required. There's a guaranteed fault response time as well as fault logging.

With the safe shared-memory system, legacy applications can be incorporated into new designs without reprogramming. As a result, it's able to take advantage of newer interprocess communication interfaces. Applications can be dynamically loaded into protected partitions. Supervisor partitions allow privileged actions to be taken under controlled conditions. Virtual memory mapping is configurable, so legacy applications can run in suitably configured partitions while new applications can take advantage of advanced virtual memory management. Standards supported include POSIX and TCP/IP.

Pricing starts at $50,000 per developer. Source code is available.

BAE Systemswww.baesystems.com

See associated figure

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

You can send press releases for new products for possible coverage on the website. I am also interested in receiving contributed articles for publishing on our website. Use our template and send to me along with a signed release form.

Check out my blog, AltEmbedded on Electronic Design, as well as his latest articles on this site that are listed below.

You can visit my social media via these links:

I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.