Real-Time Operating Systems

Scheduling, kernels and synchronisation. RTOS fundamentals and rate-monotonic scheduling, kernel internals (TCBs, context switching, PendSV, stacks), and inter-task communication and synchronisation with queues, semaphores and mutexes.

• RTOS Fundamentals & Scheduling — Real-time operating systems guarantee that tasks meet deadlines. Learn tasks, priorities and preemptive scheduling, rate-monotonic scheduling and the utilisation bound, response-time analysis, interrupts, resource sharing and priority inversion, OSEK/AUTOSAR OS and FreeRTOS.
• RTOS Kernel Internals: Tasks, Scheduler & Context Switch — Look inside a real-time kernel. Learn what a task is (TCB + stack), task states, the tick and tickless idle, priority-based preemptive scheduling with ready lists, how a Cortex-M context switch works (SysTick, PendSV, PSP/MSP, EXC_RETURN), stack sizing per task, kernel-aware interrupt priorities, and the overheads you pay for an RTOS.
• IPC & Synchronisation: Queues, Semaphores, Mutexes — Concurrent tasks must share data and coordinate safely. Learn race conditions and critical sections, message queues, binary and counting semaphores, mutexes with priority inheritance, event groups and task notifications, stream buffers, the classic problems (priority inversion, deadlock, starvation), and design rules for ISR-to-task communication.