OSE, OSEck, and OSE Epsilon
The OSE RTOS family was created to address the performance, availability, ease-of-use, and scalability shortcomings of traditional embedded RTOSes. Unlike traditional RTOSes, which were optimized for simple single-node controllers, OSE has its roots in the demanding telecom industry, where robustness, high availability, fault tolerance, deterministic behavior, field upgradeability, and the ability to scale seamlessly from a single node to thousands of nodes are top priorities.
Three RTOSes, one RTOS Solution
Traditional general-purpose RTOSes attempt to serve the entire embedded spectrum with a single one-size-fits-all solution. OSE, by contrast, provides a family of scalable, interoperable RTOSes, each optimized for specific performance, efficiency, and availability requirements. All three RTOSes share the same modular architecture, API, and programming model. So, whether the target application is a large, distributed, high-availability infrastructure system requiring hot-swap capability, a traffic bearing media processing system deployed on a DSP farm, an SoC design, or a deeply embedded application for a microcontroller with limited memory, OSE provides a unified solution that enables application code to be mixed and reused across the entire RTOS family.
Transparent, Scaleable Message Passing Model
The OSE family employs a distributed architecture based on concurrent processes communicating via direct messages. This distributed architecture and high-level programming model makes complex applications easier to conceptualize, model, partition, debug and scale. It also provides transparency, which enhances portability and scalability by separating applications from the details of the underlying hardware and physical topology.
Tailor Made for Distributed Systems
OSE’s flexible, transparent, message passing architecture makes it easy to distribute complex applications across multiple processors, nodes and shelves. In OSE, all interactions with processes are identical, whether the processes are local and private, or globally visible. OSE also uses the same mechanisms to locate and supervise processes, and the same message passing interprocess communication (IPC) to establish communications between processes, regardless of where they are physically located. This transparent, high-level model simplifies development by enabling programmers to view applications distributed across multiple nodes as a single logical system image, regardless of the network topology. It also facilitates the design of scaleable software that can be easily moved to hardware, reused across multiple generations of product and take advantage of the latest hardware upgrades.
Simple, but powerful API
The OSE RTOS family provides a simple set of system calls that are easy to learn, yet offer powerful functionality. In most cases, designers can develop the bulk of their application using just eight OSE system calls. All OSE family members share the same API, making it easy to migrate applications between the three RTOSes.
Total System Solution
Enea offers a broad range of complementary software products for the OSE family, including high-availability middleware (Element), a real-time database (Polyhedra), and LINX interprocess communications services. These products, together with OSE’s comprehensive tools support, can be bundled with OSE to create turnkey, pre-integrated platforms that give equipment makers everything they need to jump start their application development.
Business Benefits
Reduce Application Development Time and Cost
The OSE family’s transparent, simple, high-level message passing programming model makes complex applications easier to conceptualize, model, develop, debug, integrate and test. This simplicity and transparency accelerates application development and promotes code reuse, thereby reducing time to market, development and maintenance costs for multiple generations of product.
Reduce Platform Software Development and Upgrade Cost
OSE’s unified programming model, API, and IPC technology enables it to address a broad range of applications, from deeply embedded single-node controllers and DSP-based media processing subsystems, to complex distributed systems with hundreds of nodes. This versatility enables equipment makers to consolidate and reuse their platform software, thereby reducing overall platform development and maintenance costs.
Speed Time To Market for Distributed Systems
OSE’s high-level programming model greatly simplifies the design of large-scale distributed systems, particularly those combining microcontrollers, DSPs, and 32-/64-bit CPUs. With the OSE family, programmers can use a single API and IPC technology to quickly develop and deploy applications spread across multiple processors and operating systems. OSE’s consistency and transparency also makes distributed systems easier to scale and upgrade, enabling programmers to add/delete nodes and migrate application processes between nodes, processors, and operating systems with few if any changes to the application code.
Enhance Reliability; Reduce Maintenance Cost
Relative to competitive RTOSes, OSE’s high level of abstraction, transparency, and simple, yet powerful API reduce the size and complexity of application code. This simplicity, coupled with OSE’s built-in supervision, resource failure detection, and error handling, makes applications inherently more reliable. It also makes programs easier to read and understand, which increases availability by making fielded systems easier to upgrade and maintain.