Things to Look for When Choosing a Commercial RTOS
An RTOS (real-time operating system) platform serves real-time operations without any buffer or delays. It is an operating system designed to serve industrial and automation applications in realtime with real-time data processing and decision-making. A commercial RTOS for machine operations is intended to save engineering time and effort. It improves the performance, productivity, efficiency, and reliability of your embedded systems. When you look to choose a commercial RTOS, there are many things to keep in mind to embed a reliable system. While almost every real-time operating system delivers high performance and efficiency to serve industrial applications, other aspects, tools, and services of a commercial RTOS can affect your efficiency and effort. You need to look for the following things to deliver 100% performance in front of safety, security, development, deployment, and operations when selecting a commercial RTOS:
Security It should be your top priority when looking for a commercial RTOS for your industrial applications. Your RTOS platform must have all security features to help you protect safety-critical processes from potential threats. Look for a security policy related to system architecture, control access, and system resources to decide on what type of access you require to secure your system and processes. Mechanisms such as sandboxing, secure boot, rootless execution, access controls, and integrity measurement can help you achieve security goals for your system and processes. Development Environment Your RTOS platform should provide a more stable, reliable, safe, and secure development environment. A real-time operating system that enables simple integration and migration allows developers to ramp up quickly in a familiar production environment. Maintenance and update Regular maintenance and updates are essential to keep your system up-to-date with the latest services and security patches for reliable performance for a lifetime. It helps you apply security patches and add new functionality and services easily through the regular update. Some RTOS platforms require you to modify the entire kernel to address any issue or add functionality while some systems don’t require any kernel changes for the modification and maintenance. Depending on the resources and technical expertise available at your hand, you decide on what could be the right choice for your commercial applications.