Re: replace a legacy proprietary RTOS (Real-Time executive) with NetBSD!

[Mindaugas Rasiukevicius <rmind%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

Hello,

"Thirupathiah Annapureddy" <writetothiru%gmail.com@localhost> wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> We are evaluating to replace a legacy proprietary RTOS (Real-Time
> executive) with NetBSD as one of the potential and leading candidates.
> 
> ...
> 
> - Although man pages are good, it is difficult to figure out the what
> kind of APIs it provides for a particular OS service for ex:
> synchronization and communication services, threading services on both
> the kernel and user side. Is there an architecture handbook that be
> quickly browsed to find out such info and later refer to the man pages
> for more info?

While it would be nice to have a handbook (unfortunately, I do not know any),
manuals provide quite good and up-to-date documentation. Some man pages
describing common kernel interfaces, which may be a ground to start:

mutex(9), rwlock(9), condvar(9), kpreempt(9)
spl(9), callout(9), softintr(9), kthread(9)
kmem_alloc(9), pool_cache(9)

By the way, kernel preemption is currently supported only in x86. However,
since MI code is in the place, it should not be problematic to extend the
support to ARM and maybe other architectures.

NetBSD mostly conforms to the POSIX standard (including its real-time
extensions), so user-level applications can follow it.

Note that these interfaces (also relevant improvements for real-time
computing) are in upcoming 5.0 release and -current versions of NetBSD!

> 
> Thanks in advance
> Thiru

-- 
Best regards,
Mindaugas