Introduction to µITRON

The µITRON specification defines a highly flexible operating system architecture designed specifically for application in embedded systems. The specification addresses features which are common to the majority of processor architectures and deliberately avoids virtualization which would adversely impact real-time performance. The µITRON specification may be implemented on many hardware platforms and provides significant advantages by reducing the effort involved in understanding and porting application software to new processor architectures.

Several revisions of the µITRON specification exist. In this release, eCos supports the µITRON version 3.02 specification, with complete “Standard functionality” (level S), plus many “Extended” (level E) functions. An exception is get_tid() which has µITRON 4 semantics. The definitive reference on µITRON is Dr. Sakamura’s book: µITRON 3.0, An Open and Portable Real-Time Operating System for Embedded Systems. The book can be purchased from the IEEE Press, and an ASCII version of the standard can be found online at http://www.assoc.tron.org/eng/document.html. The old address http://www.sakamura-lab.org/TRON/ITRON/ still exists as a mirror site.