What are the five most commonly used real-time operating systems?

operating-system real-time rtos
mehmet6parmak picture mehmet6parmak · Mar 12, 2011 · Viewed 96.2k times · Source

I am looking for mostly used 5 Real-Time operating systems. I searched on Google and Wikipedia has a list of RTOSs, but they are in random order and also I am not convinced that all of them really operating real-time.

One more question: can we include Windows 7? When we set priority of 5 tasks, for example to realtime.

Answer

thkala picture thkala · Mar 12, 2011

Real-time operating systems that I have come in contact with, in order of (subjective) impact:

  • VxWorks
  • QNX
  • eCos
  • RTLinux

Especially VxWorks has a long history in critical applications - for example, in cars and various NASA space platforms. It is however neither free nor open source software - I would probably prefer eCos or RTLinux in one of my own projects.

This Wikipedia article also has a section with what is supposedly a list of the most deployed RTOS, although its contents are not supported by any references.

That said, if you search around a bit you will find that the most deployed RTOS are usually found in proprietary embedded systems. Many of those actually push the definition of an Operating System quite a bit (e.g. the various exokernel designs out there).

Without more informaton on your use of this list, we cannot provide more information. If you intend to develop RT software, for example, there are far more factors to consider than the popularity of each RTOS. Cost, supported hardware, familiarity with the various interfaces, vendor support for specific applications, quality of the development tools etc. should all be taken into account...

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