A growing concern of mine has been the unrealistic expectations for new computer-related technologies introduced into all kinds of organizations. Unrealistic expectations lead to disappointment, and a schizophrenic approach to the introduction of new technologies. The UNIX and real-time UNIX operating system technologies are major examples of emerging technologies with great potential benefits but unrealistic expectations. Users want to use UNIX as a common operating system throughout large segments of their organizations. A common operating system would decrease software costs by helping to provide portability and interoperability between computer systems in today's multivendor environments. Users would be able to more easily purchase new equipment and technologies and cost-effectively reuse their applications. And they could more easily connect heterogeneous equipment in different departments without having to constantly write and rewrite interfaces. On the other hand, many users in various organizations do not understand the ramifications of general-purpose versus real-time UNIX. Users tend to think of "real-time" as a way to handle exotic heart-monitoring or robotics systems. Then these users use UNIX for transaction processing and office applications and complain about its performance, robustness, and reliability. Unfortunately, the users don't realize that real-time capabilities added to UNIX can provide better performance, robustness and reliability for these non-real-time applications. Many other vendors and users do realize this, however. There are indications even now that general-purpose UNIX will go away as a separate entity. It will be replaced by a real-time UNIX. General-purpose UNIX will exist only as a subset of real-time UNIX.

A growing concern of mine has been the unrealistic expectations for new computer-related technologies introduced into all kinds of organizations. Unrealistic expectations lead to disappointment, and a schizophrenic approach to the introduction of new technologies. The UNIX and real-time UNIX operating system technologies are major examples of emerging technologies with great potential benefits but unrealistic expectations. Users want to use UNIX as a common operating system throughout large segments of their organizations. A common operating system would decrease software costs by helping to provide portability and interoperability between computer systems in today's multivendor environments. Users would be able to more easily purchase new equipment and technologies and cost-effectively reuse their applications. And they could more easily connect heterogeneous equipment in different departments without having to constantly write and rewrite interfaces. On the other hand, many users in various organizations do not understand the ramifications of general-purpose versus real-time UNIX. Users tend to think of "real-time" as a way to handle exotic heart-monitoring or robotics systems. Then these users use UNIX for transaction processing and office applications and complain about its performance, robustness, and reliability. Unfortunately, the users don't realize that real-time capabilities added to UNIX can provide better performance, robustness and reliability for these non-real-time applications. Many other vendors and users do realize this, however. There are indications even now that general-purpose UNIX will go away as a separate entity. It will be replaced by a real-time UNIX. General-purpose UNIX will exist only as a subset of real-time UNIX.

Real-Time Systems Development introduces computing students and professional programmers to the development of software for real-time applications. Based on the academic and commercial experience of the author, the book is an ideal companion to final year undergraduate options or MSc modules in the area of real-time systems design and implementation. Assuming a certain level of general systems design and programming experience, this text will extend students' knowledge and skills into an area of computing which has increasing relevance in a modern world of telecommunications and 'intelligent' equipment using embedded microcontrollers. This book takes a broad, practical approach in discussing real-time systems. It covers topics such as basic input and output; cyclic executives for bare hardware; finite state machines; task communication and synchronization; input/output interfaces; structured design for real-time systems; designing for multitasking; UML for real-time systems; object oriented approach to real-time systems; selecting languages for RTS development; Linux device drivers; and hardware/software co-design. Programming examples using GNU/Linux are included, along with a supporting website containing slides; solutions to problems; and software examples. This book will appeal to advanced undergraduate Computer Science students; MSc students; and, undergraduate software engineering and electronic engineering students. * Concise treatment delivers material in manageable sections* Includes handy glossary, references and practical exercises based on familiar scenarios* Supporting website contains slides, solutions to problems and software examples

UNIX is a trademark for a family of computer operating systems developed at Bell Laboratories. Over 300 of these systems, which run on small to large minicomputers, are used in the Bell System for program development, for support of telephone operations, for text processing, and for general-purpose computing; even more have been licensed to outside users. The papers in this volume describe highlights of the UNIX family, some important uses, and some UNIX software tools. They also attempt to convey a feeling for the particular style or outlook on program design that is both manifest in UNIX software and promoted by it.

This book integrates new ideas and topics from real time systems, embedded systems, and software engineering to give a complete picture of the whole process of developing software for real-time embedded applications. You will not only gain a thorough understanding of concepts related to microprocessors, interrupts, and system boot process, appreciating the importance of real-time modeling and scheduling, but you will also learn software engineering practices such as model documentation, model analysis, design patterns, and standard conformance.This book is split into four parts to help you learn the key concept of embedded systems; Part one introduces the development process, and includes two chapters on microprocessors and interrupts---fundamental topics for software engineers; Part two is dedicated to modeling techniques for real-time systems; Part three looks at the design of software architectures and Part four covers software implementations, with a focus on POSIX-compliant operating systems.With this book you will learn:The pros and cons of different architectures for embedded systems POSIX real-time extensions, and how to develop POSIX-compliant real time applications How to use real-time UML to document system designs with timing constraintsThe challenges and concepts related to cross-development Multitasking design and inter-task communication techniques (shared memory objects, message queues, pipes, signals)How to use kernel objects (e.g. Semaphores, Mutex, Condition variables) to address resource sharing issues in RTOS applications The philosophy underpinning the notion of "resource manager" and how to implement a virtual file system using a resource manager The key principles of real-time scheduling and several key algorithms - Coverage of the latest UML standard (UML 2.4) - Over 20 design patterns which represent the best practices for reuse in a wide range of real-time embedded systems - Example codes which have been tested in QNX---a real-time operating system widely adopted in industry