Soft Hard Real-Time Kernel

S.Ha.R.K. (the acronym stands for Soft Hard Real-time Kernel) is a completely configurable kernel architecture designed for supporting hard, soft, and non real-time applications with interchangeable scheduling algorithms.

Main features

The major benefit of the proposed kernel architecture is that an application can be developed independently from a particular system configuration, so that new modules can be added or replaced in the same application, to evaluate the effects of specific scheduling policies in terms of predictability, overhead, and performance.

Applications

It has been developed at RETIS Lab, a research facility of the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, and at the University of Pavia as a tool for teaching, testing, and developing real-time software solutions. It is used for teaching purposes, in many universities (like Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies and Malardalens University-Sweden)

Modularity

The kernel is fully modular in terms of scheduling policies, aperiodic servers, and concurrency control protocols, which typically are not modular in traditional operating systems. Modularity is achieved by partitioning the system activities between a generic kernel and a set of modules, which can be registered at initialization time to configure the kernel according to specific application requirements.

History

S.Ha.R.K. is the evolution of the Hartik Kernel and it is based on the OSLib Project.

See also

• Real-time operating system

External links

• The S.Ha.R.K. Project official site