Phoenix-RTOS - what microkernel architecture stands for?

Many times I have to answer two questions. What is the reason to develop the new operating system from scratch? There are many RTOS-es on the market, so why you develop another one?

I agree, there are many RTOS-es on the market but most of them are exo-kernels simplifying development of simple bare metal applications providing task abstraction and synchronization primitives. Sophisticated and advanced RTOS-es are closed and licensed for money. GNU/Linux and other general purpose operating systems (BSD, Mach) consisting of milion lines of code don't fit to IoT device requirements because they are to complicated. The monolithic kernel architecture tremendously limits their scalability.

From the Phoenix-RTOS born I thought about the microkernel but to speed-up the development we put everything into the kernel. We decided to develop the new version of Phoenix-RTOS based on microkernel in 2016. It is now almost ready and I would like to show the simple console output which presents the beauty of microkernel architecture.

This is the Phoenix-RTOS version developed for NXP iMX6ULL processor configured for DCU (Data Concentrator Unit) for Smart Grid, so it provides the UN*X environment for third party open-source application. All components work on user-level and could be easily removed or added. For example for purposes of simpler application like gas meters system is limited only to microkernel, drivers, MeterFS server and metering application and fit into 32 KB of RAM.

This scalability and modularity are important not only because of saving hardware resources and power. They are required to enable certification for mission critical systems like aerospace application (DO-178).

With these words I announced our next strategic step. We would like to go outside Smart Grid niche and establish a new industry standard for drones and drone swarms. After evaluating the solutions on this market I believe that using Phoenix-RTOS we are able to provide in the next year disruptive technology. Microkernel architecture will definitely help. We start with new autopilot application. Please cheer us :)