The portable operating system

Embedded systems require operating systems that make use of the underlying hardware. The operating system provides services to communicate data between processors and between processes within a processor, to signal events, to manage semaphores, and to access mass memory. The application software residing on the processor must be designed with respect to the operating system. This introduces problem when the software gets targeted to another system. The new operating system provides different services or different ways to access the same services software developers face excessive startup costs when moving to a new system because the operating system must first be developed then the applications redesigned to fit this new operating system. A portable operating system with facilities for making portable applications would greatly reduce these costs. This paper discusses research and development into such a portable system.