Real-time operating systems are much more uncomfortable to program than desktop operating systems. They often do not provide a process concept (memory protection), which separates memory spaces of different applications and there is not much abstraction from the underlying hardware. Because applications running on embedded devices become more and more complex additional abstractions are needed. Mostly it is only a small part of a real-time application really having real-time requirements. For the rest of the software one would like to have the convenience of desktop operating systems. Therefore it makes sense to modify desktop operating systems to satisfy embedded and real time needs (or having a programming environment like Java, which we discuss later). To add real-time capabilities to a non-real-time operating system there are two approaches:
The fist approach is implemented for example by MontaVista [14], who improved the preemption times of Linux. Two kernel solutions for Linux are RTLinux [7] and RTAI [8]. VxWin [16] and VenturCom's RTX [17] are two-kernel solutions for Windows NT.
Due to the complexity of operating systems like Linux it is a very difficult task to improve preemption times. Because it is really hard to examine every code path in the kernel, worst case preemption times cannot be guaranteed. The interrupt abstraction model allows predicting worse case times in the small real-time layer exactly. A detailed comparison of the two approaches for Linux can be read in the articles [9] [10] [11].