pSOS (real-time operating system)

pSOS (Portable Software On Silicon) is a real time operating system (RTOS), created in about 1982 by Alfred Chao, and developed/marketed for the first part of its life by his company Software Components Group (SCG). In the 1980s pSOS rapidly became the RTOS of choice for all embedded systems based on the Motorola 68000 family architecture, because it was written in 68000 assembler and was highly optimised from the start. It was also modularised, with early support for OS-aware debugging, plug-in device drivers, TCP/IP stacks, language libraries and disk subsystems. Later came source-level debugging, multi-processor support and further networking extensions.

pSOS
DeveloperAlfred Chao / SCG / ISI / Wind River Systems
Written in68000 assembler
OS familyReal-time operating systems
Working stateDiscontinued
Source modelClosed source
Initial release1982 (1982)
Marketing targetEmbedded systems
PlatformsMotorola 68000
Kernel typeReal-time
LicenseProprietary

In about 1991, Software Components Group was acquired by Integrated Systems Inc. (ISI) who further developed pSOS - now restyled as pSOS+ - for other microprocessor families, by rewriting the greater part of it in C. Attention was also paid to supporting successively more integrated development environments, culminating in pRISM+.

In July 1994, Integrated Systems acquired Digital Research's modular real-time multi-tasking operating system FlexOS from Novell.[1]

In 1995, Integrated Systems offered a pSOSystem/NEST package for Novell's Embedded Systems Technology (NEST).[2][1]

In February 2000 Integrated Systems Inc. was acquired by Wind River Systems, the originators of rival RTOS VxWorks. Despite initial reports that pSOS support would continue, development was halted. Wind River announced plans for a 'convergence' version of VxWorks which will support pSOS system calls, and that no further releases of pSOS itself will be made.

NXP Semiconductors acquired pSOS for TriMedia from Wind River and continued to support this OS for the TriMedia VLIW core.

Migration away from pSOS

In March 2000, rival company Express Logic released their Evaluation Kit for pSOS+ users, designed to provide a migration path to its ThreadX RTOS.

During August 2000, MapuSoft Technologies Inc. came up with the pSOS OS Changer porting kit which can smoothly move the software to multiple OS such as Linux, VxWorks and more. It includes an IDE and API optimization along with a profiling tool to measure API timing on target boards (www.mapusoft.com).

In August 2007, RoweBots, a former partner of SCG and ISI, open sourced their pSOS+ compatible version called Reliant. It is available to all that wish to upgrade without applications changes.

The Xenomai project supports pSOS+ APIs (and others traditional RTOS APIs) over a Linux-based real-time framework to allow existing industrial applications to migrate easily to a GNU/Linux-based environment while keeping stringent real-time guarantees.

Another open sourced alternative is RTEMS, which has support for various APIs, including the "Classic API" (compatible to pSOS) and the POSIX API. Compared to GNU/Linux, RTEMS is a closer match to pSOS applications due to its lower memory footprint and its strict realtime behaviour.

Popular SSL/TLS libraries such as wolfSSL still support pSOS.

See also

References
  1. "pSOSystem and the NEST Development Environment - Designing Embedded Applications with NetWare Connectivity" (White paper). Integrated Systems, Inc. (ISI). 1998. Archived from the original on 1998-02-19.
  2. "Novell Announces RTOS Vendor Program Which Brings Integrated Networking Solutions to the Embedded Systems Marketplace" (Press Release). Orem, UT, USA: Novell, Inc. 1995-05-23. Archived from the original on 2018-08-18. Retrieved 2018-08-18. "Because Novell used Integrated Systems' FlexOS during the development and testing of NEST, we are in the unique position of supporting it through both our real-time product lines pSOSystem for deeply embedded markets, and FlexOS for point of sale," said Moses Joseph, vice president of marketing for Integrated Systems. "Developers using the FlexOS development kit and the expanded pSOSystem/NEST package for everything from home security and entertainment to office automation and global communications applications, now have quick and easy access to the widest variety of standard networking protocols.

Further reading
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