The Operating System Embedded (known by the acronym Enea OSE) is a real-time embedded operating system created by the Swedish information technology company ENEA AB. Bengt Eliasson, who at the time was a consultant from ENEA with an assignment at Ericsson, wrote the basic parts of the kernel. The early version for the Zilog Z80 processor was named OS80.
Architecture and abilities
OSE uses events (named signals due to ENEA's telecom background) in the form of messages passed to and from processes in the system. Messages are stored in a queue attached to each process. A 'link handler' mechanism allows signals to be passed between processes on separate machines, over a variety of transports. The OSE signalling mechanism formed the basis of an open-source inter-process kernel design project called LINX.
Fault tolerant, distributed architecture
Modular, layered microkernel architecture
Event-driven, deterministic real-time response
Asynchronous direct message-passing model
Scalable hybrid multicore solution exploiting the advantages from both SMP and AMP models
Memory protected
Centralized error handling and remediation
Built-in task (process) monitoring and failure detection
Dynamic, run-time program loading
Power management with low-power sleep mode
Demand paging support for optimizing RAM usage
Comprehensive networking/security support
Multiple file system choices including crash-safe, journaling file system
Distributed system-level simulation
Run Mode Monitor (RMM) for remote monitoring, tracing, profiling, and debugging
Optima, an Eclipse-based integrated development environment and tools suite
Enea OSE Multicore Edition was released in 2009 and is based on the same microkernel architecture. The kernel design that combines the advantages of both traditional asymmetric multiprocessing (AMP) and symmetric multiprocessing (SMP).
The hybrid AMP/SMP kernel in OSE Multicore Edition is based on a number of:
Essential services in OSE are implemented according to a micro kernel model which allows IP stacks, file systems, application loaders, etc. to be located on different cores, while applications can access these services regardless of location in the system (location transparency).
A kernel that instantiates a separate scheduler on each core with associated data structures to preserve determinism and realtime characteristics.
User-defined process migration and load balancing based on low intrusion mechanisms to measure CPU load on each core.
A lightweight kernel internal IPC mechanism called kernel events used to perform asynchronous, cross core transactions in order to avoid the use of fine-granular locking designs, which has a detrimental effect on performance.
The Enea OSE family of RTOS features 3 OSs: OSE for ARM processors, PowerPC and MIPS, OSEck for various DSP's, and OSE Epsilon for minimal devices, written in pure assembly(ARM processors, ColdFire) .
OSE supports many mainly 32-bit processors:
ARM family:
ARM9E
ARM11
Xscale
ARM Cortex
PowerPC family:
IBM PPC4xx
IBM PPC7xx
Freescale MPC86xx (multicore support on MPC8641D)
Freescale MPC85xx (multicore support on MPC8572DS, QorIQ P2020, P4080)
Freescale MPC83xx
Freescale MPC82xx
Freescale MPC74xx
MIPS family
Cavium Octeon Plus (CN58xx and CN56xx)
MIPS32
