The RT-Thread project’s R&D team has spent three years of research and intensive development to arrive at the project’s latest offering: RT-Thread Smart. It is a microkernel operating system aimed primarily at midrange to high-end processors such as RISC-V or Arm Cortex-A that with a memory management unit (MMU) and provides a competitive and POSIX-based software platform for all industries in the embedded space.
RT-Thread Smart is a professional, high-performance, microkernel operating system for real-time applications. It offers an open source foundation for embedded devices in any market, including security (e.g., internet protocol cameras), industrial control, onboard devices, consumer electronics, and anything else using embedded technology (which is increasingly coming to mean “everything”).
It’s significant because, unlike traditional IoT operating systems, a microkernel operating system can fill the gap between a traditional real-time operating system (RTOS) and a comparatively large operating system like Linux to achieve the best balance between real-time performance, cost, security, startup speed, and more.
Comparison with RT-Thread:
You might be wondering about the differences between RT-Thread Smart and RT-Thread. Simply put, RT-Thread Smart is an RT-Thread RTOS-based operating system, but it integrates the user-space process. The kernel part of RT-Smart is essentially RT-Thread RTOS; it runs on virtual addresses, adds process management, and uses interprocess communication mechanisms, virtual memory/address space management, ELF loaders, and so on, and it makes all of these features components within RT-Thread RTOS. When the IwP components are disabled, RT-Smart falls back onto RT-Thread RTOS.
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