Development of educational material for real-time operating system

The importance of understanding real-time OS is getting higher and higher from academic field to industrial field. And it is difficult not only to understand the concept of real-time OS but also implement applications working on it. We develop an educational material to study real-time OS. Our educational material can cover both, the concept of real-time OS and implementation of application. Usually we evaluate real-time OS with using microprocessor boards. However, microcomputer boards are difficult to keep using as educational materials because companies of microcomputer boards often change their specification of boards or discontinue products. Therefore, we use cygwin, which is UNIX environment working on Microsoft Windows OS, for simulation environment. Students do not need to prepare any actual equipment. We choose OSEK/VDX OS for real-time OS. Students can work OSEK/VDX OS on cygwin. We developed “Live cygwin” which can execute cygwin applications directly from CD ROM without installing on the PC. OSEK/VDX is an open standard specification developed for automotive embedded software in Europe. As executable code of OSEK/VDX OS on cygwin environment, we use TOPPERS ATK. TOPPERS ATK (Automotive Kernel) is open source code implemented of OSEK/VDX OS by TOPPERS (Toyohashi Open Platform for Embedded Real-Time Systems). And we developed UML documentations of OSEK/VDX OS. These materials can help students' understanding the real-time OS through developing and simulating their programs. UML documentation is reference for them.