The ITRON project is the first of several sub-architectures of the

TRON project TRON (acronym for The Real-time Operating system Nucleus) is an open architecture real-time operating system kernel design. The project was started by Professor Dr. Ken Sakamura of the University of Tokyo in 1984. The project's goal is to create ...

. Originally undertaken in 1984, ITRON is a Japanese

open standard An open standard is a standard that is openly accessible and usable by anyone. It is also a prerequisite to use open license, non-discrimination and extensibility. Typically, anybody can participate in the development. There is no single definition ...

for a real-time operating system (RTOS) initiated under the guidance of

Ken Sakamura Ken or KEN may refer to: Entertainment * ''Ken'' (album), a 2017 album by Canadian indie rock band Destroyer. * ''Ken'' (film), 1964 Japanese film. * ''Ken'' (magazine), a large-format political magazine. * Ken Masters, a main character in t ...

. This project aims to standardize the RTOS and related specifications for

embedded system An embedded system is a computer system—a combination of a computer processor, computer memory, and input/output peripheral devices—that has a dedicated function within a larger mechanical or electronic system. It is ''embedded'' as ...

s, particularly small-scale embedded systems. The ITRON RTOS is targeted for consumer electronic devices, such as

mobile phone A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link whil ...

s and fax machines. Various vendors sell their own implementations of the RTOS.

Details

ITRON, and µITRON (sometimes also spelled uITRON or microITRON) are the name of RTOS specifications coming out of ITRON projects. 'µ' means that the particular specification is meant for the smaller 8-bit or 16-bit CPU targets. Specifications are available for free. Commercial implementations are available, and offered under many different licenses. On 10 November 2017, the

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

acquired ownership of the 16- and 32- bit uITRON from TRON Forum. A few sample sources exist, and there are many commercial source offerings, too. Examples of open source RTOSes incorporating an API based on µITRON specification are

eCos The Embedded Configurable Operating System (eCos) is a free and open-source real-time operating system intended for embedded systems and applications which need only one process with multiple threads. It is designed to be customizable to preci ...

and RTEMS. ITRON specification is meant for hard real-time embedded RTOS. It is very popular in the embedded market, as there are many applications for it, i.e., devices with the OS embedded inside. For example, there is an ACM Queue interview with Jim Ready, founder of MontaVista (realtime linux company), "Interview with Jim Reddy", April 2003, ACM Queue. He says in the interview, "The single, most successful RTOS in Japan historically is µITRON. This is an indigenous open specification led by Dr. Ken Sakamura of the University of Tokyo. It is an industry standard there." Many Japanese digital cameras, for example, have use ITRON specification OS. Toyota automobile has used ITRON specification OS for engine control. Supported CPUs are numerous. ARM, MIPS,

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was introd ...

, FR-V and many others including CPUs supported by open source RTOS

and RTEMS, both of which include the support for µITRON compatible APIs. ITRON'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. This makes keeping the binary compatibility among different implementations impossible. This led to the development of

T-Kernel T-Kernel is an open source real-time operating system (RTOS) designed for 32-bit microcontrollers. It is standardized by the T-Engine Forum, which distributes it under a ''T-License'' agreement. There is also a corresponding Micro T-Kernel (μT-Ker ...

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 that promoted the specification by publishing it as well as other TRON specification OSes. But since the first quarter of 2010, it has become part of T-Engine Forum, another non-profit organization that promotes other operating system such as the next generation RTOS,

. T-Kernel is the name of the specification and 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. JTRON (Java TRON) is a sub-project of ITRON to allow it to use the Java platform.

References

External links

* , TRON *
Dr. Ken Sakamura Lab

{{Real-time operating systems TRON project de:ITRON

Details

See also

References

External links