High Real-Time Performance
The SCIOPTA architecture is specifically designed to provide excellent real-time performance and small size. Internal data structures, memory management, interprocess communication and time management are highly optimized.
Pre-emptive Real-Time Kernel
SCIOPTA is a high performance fully pre-emptive real-time operating system for hard real-time application available for many target platforms.
Interrupts can be serviced at any time, even inside the kernel.
Reduced Time-to-Market
SCIOPTA message based real-time operating system. A minimal set of six system calls is sufficient to write an application. Nevertheless a powerful set of system calls is available to control the resources. Standardized processes and interprocess communication result in clear system designs and are easy to write, to read and to maintain.
As processes are communicating with well defined messages and processes can be grouped into modules, SCIOPTA systems are very well suited for team work in big projects. The time-to-market will be reduced dramatically.
Message Based Architecture
SCIOPTA is designed on a asynchronous direct message architecture. Messages are sent directly between process without and intermediate mailbox. Messages are the tool for interprocess communication and synchronization.
SCIOPTA messages are stored and maintained in memory pools. The kernel memory pool manager is designed for high performance and memory fragmentation is avoided.
SCIOPTA Modules
Processes can be grouped in SCIOPTA modules, which allows you to design a very modular system. Modules can be static or created and killed during run-time as a whole.
SCIOPTA modules can be used to encapsulate whole system blocks (such as a communication stack) and protect them from other modules in the system.
Easy to Debug
A SCIOPTA system can be easily debugged by tracing messages until a breaking or blocking situation is reached. The message trace allows analysis of the message sequence preceding a possible faulty system state.
A SCIOPTA message contains besides the user data also additional information maintained by the Kernel. This includes the owner, sender and addressee process of the message. The user can quickly find lost messages or messages which have been sent to wrong processes, by analyzing the message pools.
Fully Dynamic
All system components such as modules, interrupt processes, timer processes, prioritized processes and message pools are fully dynamic in SCIOPTA. They can be created and killed during run-time.
Dynamic though is optional and fully static systems are also possibel.
Error Handling
SCIOPTA features centralized error handling by using an error hook. Each time the kernel detects an error, the error hook will be called. This guarantees consistent error handling covering the whole system. The user application may also throw errors to be handled in the error hook.
Problems common in traditional operating systems, when using individual error handling by different team members spread over the whole application code, is avoided in SCIOPTA.
Supervision
SCIOPTA has built-in support for process supervision. A process can register another process for supervision. If the supervised process dies, the kernel will send a message to the supervisor.