Course Overview

A real-time operating system (RTOS) is an operating system (OS) intended to serve real-time application requests. It must be able to process data as it comes in, typically without buffering delays. Processing time requirements (including any OS delay) are measured in tenths of seconds or shorter. A key characteristic of an RTOS is the level of its consistency concerning the amount of time it takes to accept and complete an application’s task; the variability is jitter.^[1] A hard real-time operating system has less jitter than a soft real-time operating system. The chief design goal is not high throughput, but rather a guarantee of a soft or hard performance category. An RTOS that can usually or generally meet a deadline is a soft real-time OS, but if it can meet a deadline deterministically it is a hard real-time OS.