ITRON project: Difference between revisions

The '''ITRON''' project is the first of several sub-architectures of the [[TRON Projectproject]].

Examples of open source RTOSRTOSes thatincorporating incorporatesan API based on [[uITRON]]μITRON specification are [[eCos]], and [[RTEMS]] which are mentioned in the [[List of real-time operating systems]].

ITRON specification is meant for hard real-time embedded RTOS.

For example, there is an ACM Queue Interviewinterview with Jim Ready, founder of MontaVista (realtime linux company), "Interview with Jim Reddy", April 2003, ACM Queue.<ref>{{Cite [httpweb|url=https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=644261]|title=Interview - ACM Queue|website=queue.acm.org}}</ref> He says in the interview, "The single, most successful RTOS in Japan historically is micro iTRONμITRON. This is an indigenous open specification led by Dr. Ken Sakamura of the University of Tokyo. It is an industry standard there."

Supported CPUs are numerous. [[ARM architecture|ARM]], [[MIPS architecture|MIPS]], [[x86]], architecture[[SuperH|x86SH]] [[FR-V]] and many others including CPUs supported by open source RTOS [[eCos]] and [[RTEMS]], both of which include the support for uITRONμITRON compatible APIs.

TheITRON's popularity comes from many factors, but one factor is the notion of "loose standardization": the API specification is at the source level, and does not specify binary API compatibility. This makes it possible for implementers to make use of features of the particular CPU model to which the implementation is targeted. The developer even has the freedom of choosing to pass the parameters using a consolidated packet, or separate parameters to API (system call, library call, etc.). Such freedom is important to make the best use of not so powerful 8-bit or 16-bit CPUs. (However, thisThis makes keeping the binary compatibility among different implementations impossible. This led to the development of [[T-Kernel]] in the 2000s in order to promote binary compatibility for middleware distribution.

ITRON specification promotion was done by the various companies which sell the commercial implementations. There was also an NPO TRON Association<ref>{{Cite [web|url=http://www.tron.org/]|title=TRON Forum|website=www.tron.org}}</ref> that promoted the specification by publishing it as well as other TRON specification OSsOSes. But since the first quarter of 2010, it has become part of T-Engine Forum,<ref>{{Cite [web|url=http://www.t-engine.org/],|title=The name of T-Engine Forum was changed to TRON Forum|website=www.t-engine.org}}</ref> another non-profit organization that promotes other operating system such as the next generation RTOS, [[T-Kernel]].

[[T-Kernel]] is the name of the specification ANDand at the same time refers to the single implementation based on the authorized source code available from T-Engine Forum for free under T-License. So T-Kernel doesn't suffer from the binary API compatibility.