Best Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOS) for Linux of 2024

FreeRTOS, which was developed in partnership with some of the world's most renowned chip companies over a 15 year period, is now downloaded every 170 second. It is a market-leading real time operating system (RTOS), for microcontrollers, small microprocessors. FreeRTOS is freely distributed under the MIT open-source license. It includes a kernel as well as a growing number of IoT libraries that can be used across all industries. FreeRTOS is designed with reliability and ease-of-use in mind. The FreeRTOS kernel has been trusted by leading companies around the world as the standard for microcontrollers/small microprocessors. It is known for its reliability, small footprint, and wide device support. You don't need to know how to set up a project. There are pre-configured demos that can be used as templates and IoT reference integrations. You can quickly download, compile, then get to market quicker. Our partner ecosystem offers a variety of options, including professional support and community contributions.

Arm Mbed OS, an open-source IoT operating platform, is free and available for download. It includes all the features needed to create IoT products. The OS contains everything you need for smart, connected products that run on Arm Cortex M based hardware. This includes machine learning capabilities, security stacks, connectivity stacks, and drivers for sensors and other I/O devices. Arm Mbed OS was designed for the Internet of Things. It integrates with connectivity, machine-learning, networking, security stacks, and is supported by software libraries, tutorials, hardware, and examples. Mbed OS supports over 70 silicon, module and cloud partners. This allows you to optimize your developer choice. Mbed OS API allows you to keep your application code clean, portable, and easy while taking advantage security, communications, and machine learning. The integrated solution reduces development time, cost, and risk.

INTEGRITY uses hardware-memory protection to protect embedded applications. Secure partitions ensure that each task has the resources it requires to run properly and fully protect the operating systems and user tasks from malicious code, such as denial-of service attacks, worms, or Trojan horses. Green Hills Software provides a wide range of middleware that has been integrated and validated for INTEGRITY. This includes FFS, FAT and NFS file systems, journaling file system, IPv4/IPv6 routing and networking stacks, FIPS 140-2 Suite B certified embedded encryption library, as well as FFS, FAT and NFS. Each package has been tested and pre-integrated to work seamlessly with INTEGRITY's advanced RTOS capabilities. Green Hills Software provides platforms that offer a fully integrated ecosystem for certain industries. Each platform includes both the INTEGRITY ROS and development tools.

SCIOPTA architecture was specifically designed to deliver high real-time performance with a small footprint. High-quality optimizations have been made to optimize internal data structures, memory management, and interprocess communication. SCIOPTA is a preemptive real-time kernel. Interrupts can be handled at any time, even within the kernel. SCIOPTA, a message-based real-time operating platform, is available. To manage the resources, a powerful set of system calls can be used. Clear system designs are possible thanks to standard processes and interprocess communication. They are easy to understand, write and maintain. SCIOPTA systems can be used to facilitate teamwork in large projects because they communicate with clearly defined messages. This will dramatically reduce the time-to-market. SCIOPTA uses a message-based architecture that allows for direct message passing between processes. Messages are used mainly for interprocess communication and synchronization.

PikeOS is a separation kernel-based hypervisor that supports multiple partitions for many operating systems and applications. It allows you to create smart devices for the Internet-of-Things. PikeOS is the best choice for systems that require protection against Cyber-Security attack due to its separation kernel approach. It is widely used in millions of edge and IoT systems. However, it has also been deployed in critical communications infrastructures. PikeOS combines virtualization and real time with unique technologies that have never been seen before. It allows you to move multiple complex embedded circuit boards into one hardware. It is also able to handle new hardware concepts like Big-SoCs that have multiple heterogeneous cores. PikeOS can run on multiple architectures and support processors that have a memory management unit (MMU).

QNX's real time operating systems have been used by thousands of companies since 1980 to provide the best combination of security, performance, and reliability in mission critical systems. The core of QNX technology lies in the QNX Neutrino® Real-time Opera System (RTOS), which is a fully-featured RTOS that enables next-generation products in all industries where reliability is important, such as automotive, medical devices and transportation. A component failure does not affect the kernel or other components of the QNX microkernel architecture. The system can be shut down and restarted with no adverse effects from the failed component. The QNX Neutrino RTOS provides the determinism that only a real-time operating system can offer. Techniques like adaptive partitioning ensure critical processes get the cycles they require to complete their tasks on schedule while still maintaining the performance required by complex embedded systems.

Deos™, DDC–I's safety-critical space partitioned real time operating system (RTOS), has been tested to the guidance DO-178C/ED-12C Design Assurance level A (DAL-A) for Avionics Applications. It supports ARINC 653, APEX, and rate monotonic scheduling (RMS) and is targeted at FACE Safety Base Profile. Since 1998's audit by Transport Canada, it has been field-proven as a safety-critical RTOS. It has been certified and is currently flying in tens of thousands of aircraft. It has evolved over the past two decades with new processors or features in subsequent baselines. It has been audited successfully by various governmental certification agencies (FAA, ENAC and JAA, EASA and EASA), and airframe and Avionics Supplier Designated Engineering Representatives.

The MQX real time operating system (RTOS), provides real-time performance in a small, configurable footprint. The RTOS is tightly integrated to 32-bit MCUs from NXP, and comes with common device drivers. The MQX-RTOS has a component-based microkernel design that allows for customization by feature, size, speed, and satisfies embedded system memory constraints. The MQX RTOS can take as little as 8 KB ROM and 2.5K RAM on Arm Cortex M4, including kernel and 2 task applications, 1 LW Semaphore and interrupt stack, queues and memory manager. This RTOS core provides additional, optional services. The components are only linked in when they are needed. This prevents unused functions from bloating memory. For further control over size, RAM/ROM utilization, and performance options, key components are available in lightweight and full versions.

OpenWrt is an extensible GNU/Linux distribution that can be used on embedded devices (mostly wireless routers). OpenWrt, unlike other router distributions, is a fully-featured and easily modifiable operating systems for embedded devices. This means that you can have all of the features you want with no bloat thanks to a modern Linux kernel. OpenWrt allows you to create a single static firmware instead of trying to create one. It also provides an optional filesystem that can be writable with package management. This allows you to bypass vendor restrictions on application selection and configuration and allows you to use packages for customizing embedded devices to suit any application. OpenWrt is a framework for developers to build applications without the need to create a full firmware image and distribute it.

Enea OSE, a robust, high performance, real-time operating system, is optimized for multiprocessor systems that require deterministic real time behavior and high availability. It reduces development time, improves reliability, and lowers lifetime maintenance costs for a wide variety of systems, including wireless devices, automobiles, medical instruments, and telecom infrastructure. Enea OSE is optimized to handle communication and control systems that require high performance and hard-real-time characteristics. It is used extensively in areas such as telecom networking systems, wireless devices and industrial automation. The Enea OSE multicore kernel, twice awarded with an award, provides Symmetric Multi-Processing and Asymmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) along with the scalability of Asymmetric Multi-Processing and determinism (AMP) and the performance and reliability of bare metal.

From simple embedded environmental sensors to advanced embedded controllers and smart watches to IoT wireless applications, there are many options. Implements configurable architecture-specific stack-overflow protection, kernel object and device driver permission tracking, and thread isolation with thread-level memory protection on x86, ARC, and ARM architectures, userspace, and memory domains. Supports combining application-specific code and a custom kernel on platforms without MMU/MPU or memory constrained devices to create a monolithic images that are loaded and executed on a system’s hardware. Both the kernel and application code are executed in a single address space.