Design of a real-time virtual machine (RTVM)

The commercial software industry has a number of different operating system vendors offering various features. Real-time operating systems (RTOS's) are primarily proprietary, closed source, expensive, and uniquely designed to specific applications. Software designers must examine a given real-time operating system to ensure an RTOS will meet the real-time requirements for an intended platform. An RTOS does often not meet the original real-time constraints, when product evolves to new hardware platforms. This makes the evolution of real-time systems a cumbersome and difficult problem. In this paper we describe a new approach to real-time system development. Instead of reinventing software for a real-time system, we provide a generic and platform independent virtual machine. We discuss the design, architecture, and implementation of a real-time virtual machine (RTVM). The RTVM provides a generic real-time platform, where real-time applications using the Java paradigm can operate on various platforms without re-writing the code.