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FAQ

What's a real-time OS?
A real-time OS pays lots of attention to bounding response times to external events (interrupts) and allows to handle periodically occuring tasks. It may support things like locking pages into memory or deadline-based scheduling. Applications are usually focused on process control rather than multi-user timesharing. Example: CMX, Lynx, pSOS, QNX, VxWorks.
What makes a system embedded?
Embedded systems are part of a larger non-computer system, including cars, machine tools, printing presses, toasters and washing machines. They serve a single purpose rather than being used for general-purpose computation. The most common example is the ignition/emission control computer in almost all modern vehicles. Embedded systems can use any processor, including Intel 80x86 chips and may even use PC motherboards, but in many cases, since running common application software is not an issue, RISC chips (such as the ARM, MIPS or Intel i960 chips) are cheaper for the same processing power and may contain more built-in peripherals such as serial ports or timers.
Can you tell us the difference between a RISC and CISC processor? When people refer to RISC architecture, do they just refer RISC processor?
See any modern computer architecture book. RISC architecture refers to chips that (roughly) have fewer instructions than traditional CISC devices such as the VAX hardware or the Intel 80x86 series. RISC instructions operate on registers only, plus load and store to/from memory. RISC instructions are often fixed-length and may have less variability in terms of clock cycles used. Older RISC designs only performed integer arithmetic, but that is no longer the case. Examples of RISC chips include the MIPS, SPARC, i960 and ARM series of processors.

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Last updated by Henning Schulzrinne