Why use an RTOS/real time operating systems ?

There are well-established techniques for writing good embedded software without the use of an RTOS. In some cases, these techniques may provide the most appropriate solution; however as the solution becomes more complex, the benefits of an RTOS become more apparent. These include:

Priority Based Scheduling: The ability to separate critical processing from non-critical is a powerful tool.

Abstracting Timing Information: The RTOS is responsible for timing and provides API functions. This allows for cleaner (and smaller) application code.

Maintainability/Extensibility: Abstracting timing dependencies and task based design results in fewer interdependencies between modules. This makes for easier maintenance.

Modularity: The task based API naturally encourages modular development as a task will typically have a clearly defined role.

Promotes Team Development: The task-based system allows separate designers/teams to work independently on their parts of the project.

Easier Testing: Modular task based development allows for modular task based testing.

Code Reuse: Another benefit of modularity is that similar applications on similar platforms will inevitably lead to the development of a library of standard tasks.

Improved Efficiency: An RTOS can be entirely event driven; no processing time is wasted polling for events that have not occurred.

Idle Processing: Background or idle processing is performed in the idle task. This ensures that things such as CPU load measurement, background CRC checking etc will not affect the main processing.

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