RTOS memory utilization

Colin Walls, Mentor Graphics
embedded.com (September 02, 2015)

Most embedded systems of non-trivial complexity employ an operating system of some kind - commonly an RTOS. Ultimately, the OS is an overhead, which uses time and memory that could otherwise have been used by the application code. As an embedded system has limited resources, this overhead needs to be carefully evaluated, which commonly leads to questions about RTOS memory footprint. This article looks at how memory is used by an RTOS and why the memory footprint question may be hard to answer.

How big is the RTOS?
If you were considering the purchase of a real time operating system (or, for that matter, any piece of software IP for an embedded application), you would probably like to get clear information on the amount of memory that it uses. It is very likely that an RTOS vendor will be unwilling – or actually, to be more precise – unable to provide you with such seemingly obvious information. The reason for this is that there are a huge number of variables.

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