Mission Statement

RTEMS development aims to provide a free deterministic real-time operating system targeted towards deeply embedded systems which is competitive with closed source products. The RTEMS project encourages the support and use of standard APIs in order to promote application portability and ease porting other packages to the RTEMS environment.

The RTEMS development effort uses an open development environment in which all users collaborate to improve RTEMS. The RTEMS cross development toolset is based upon the free GNU tools and the open source C Library newlib. RTEMS supports many host platforms and target architectures.

Free Software Project

Although RTEMS is not an official GNU project under the auspices of the FSF, it does support the free software goals of the GNU project.

• RTEMS and supporting components are available under various free licenses with copyrights being held by individual authors or the FSF.
• All software which executes on the target will not place undue restrictions on embedded applications.
• Patches must be legally acceptable for inclusion into the RTEMS project.

Design and Development Goals

• Ports to new architectures and CPU models
• More Board Support Packages
• Improved runtime libraries
• Faster debug cycle
• Various other infrastructure improvements

Open Development Environment

• Encourage cooperation and communication between developers.
• Work more closely with "consumers".
• Code available to everyone at any time, and everyone is welcome to participate in development.
  • Patches will be considered equally based on their technical merits.
  • All individuals and companies are welcome to contribute as long as they accept the ground rules.
• Open mailing lists.
• Developer friendly tools and procedures (i.e., CVS, multiple maintainers, etc).
• Conflicts of interest exist for many RTEMS developers; the developers as well as the RTEMS Steering Committee will not allow those conflicts of interest to have an effect on the development of RTEMS.