About the RTEMS Project

The RTEMS Project is an open collection that hosts, administers and coordinates the open project

RTEMS

The Real-Time Executive for Multiprocessor Systems or RTEMS is an open source Real Time Operating System (RTOS) that supports open standard application programming interfaces (API) such as POSIX. It is used in space flight, medical, networking and many more embedded devices. RTEMS currently supports 18 processor architectures and approximately 200 BSPs. These include ARM, PowerPC, Intel, SPARC, RISC-V, MIPS, and more. RTEMS includes multiple file systems, symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), embedded shell, and dynamic loading as well as a high-performance, full-featured IPV4/IPV6 TCP/IP stack from FreeBSD which also provides RTEMS with USB.

Major decisions about RTEMS are made by the core developers in concert with the user community, guided by the Mission Statement. We provide access to our development sources via a Git Repository (see these Instructions for details). We strive to provide regular, high-quality releases, which we want to work well on a wide range of embedded targets using cross development from a variety of hosts including GNU/Linux distributions, MS Windows, BSDs, Solaris, and Mac OS. We encourage everyone to contribute changes and feedback to RTEMS.

Commercial support is available from US and European companies, and free support comes via the active global community.

RTEMS development aims to provide a free deterministic real-time operating system targeted towards deeply embedded systems which is competitive with closed source products. The RTEMS project encourages the support and use of standard APIs in order to promote application portability and ease porting other packages to the RTEMS environment.

The RTEMS development effort uses an open development environment in which all users collaborate to improve RTEMS. The RTEMS cross development toolset is based upon the free GNU tools and the open source C Library Newlib. RTEMS supports many host platforms and target architectures.

Free Software Project

The free software goals of the project are:

  • RTEMS and supporting components are available under various free licenses with copyrights being held by individual authors.
  • All software which executes on the target will not place undue restrictions on embedded applications.
  • Patches must be legally acceptable for inclusion into the RTEMS project or the specific project being used.

Design and Development Goals

  • Source based development with all users building from source
  • Any suitable host should be supported
  • Open testing, tests and test results.
  • Ports to new architectures and CPU models
  • Addition of Board Support Packages for available hardware
  • Improved runtime libraries
  • Faster debug cycle
  • Various other infrastructure improvements

Open Development Environment

  • Encourage cooperation and communication between developers.
  • Work more closely with “consumers”.
  • Code available to everyone at any time, and everyone is welcome to participate in development.
  • Patches will be considered equally based on their technical merits.
  • All individuals and companies are welcome to contribute as long as they accept the ground rules.
  • Open mailing lists.
  • Developer friendly tools and procedures with a focus on keeping them current.
  • Conflicts of interest exist for many RTEMS developers. The developers contributing to the RTEMS Project must put the interests of the RTEMS Project first.