Description

Advanced Real-Time Kernel Solution

SYS/BIOS™ 6.x is an advanced, real-time kernel for use in a wide range of DSPs, ARMs, and microcontrollers. It is designed for use in embedded applications that need real-time scheduling, synchronization, and instrumentation. It provides preemptive multitasking, hardware abstraction, and memory management. Compared to its predecessor, DSP/BIOS™ 5.x, it has numerous enhancements in functionality and performance. Customers requiring a more full-featured real-time operating system including drivers, networking and USB stacks, may wish to consider TI-RTOS, which is available for select TI devices. TI-RTOS is built on SYS/BIOS enabling developers to easily transition to a full RTOS solution.

SYS/BIOS 6.x is currently available for TI C64x+ core based devices (including the OMAP35x™ and DaVinci™ digital video processors), TMS320C674x™ devices (including OMAP-L13x), TMS320C66x™ multicore processors, Sitara™ ARM9® Cortex A8® microprocessors, as well as TMS320C28x™, Stellaris™ Cortex M3™, and MSP430™ microcontrollers.

SYS/BIOS 6.x is provided with full source code and requires no runtime license fees. SYS/BIOS 6.x is available both standalone and as an integral part of the Code Composer Studio™ Interactive Development Environment (CCStudio IDE) v4.x and v5.x.

Within CCStudio, SYS/BIOS 6.x provides a number of handy project templates to use as a starting point for your application. A graphical configuration tool helps you create the static configuration used by SYS/BIOS 6.x at build time. In addition, a Runtime Object Viewer (ROV) and analysis tools focus on debugging and tuning multitasking applications. SYS/BIOS 6.x is backed by an experienced development, training, and support organization that ensures product quality and availability on the latest TI devices.

Additional Information

• TI-RTOS - Product Folder
• Wiki: SYS/BIOS Advanced RTOS
• Embedded Target Content Downloads
• TI E2E Forum: SYS/BIOS

Features

SYS/BIOS 6.x Overview

SYS/BIOS 6.x and its associated IPC and XDCtools components provide a rich set of C-callable, deterministic kernel services that enable developers to create sophisticated applications without compromising real-time deadlines.

In SYS/BIOS 6.x, the services provided in DSP/BIOS 5.x have been separated into three separate packages. Logging, tracing, and memory management services are provided by the XDCtools component, which enables them to be used by other applications that do not need a multitasking scheduler. Likewise, the Inter-Processor Communication (IPC) component, which provides message passing and other IPC mechanisms, is independent of the core SYS/BIOS 6.x kernel functionality. As a result, you can use the IPC APIs to facilitate communication between subsystems running different operating systems.

Objects from all three components are configured, built, and traced using a common tool infrastructure, providing a seamless user experience.
SYS/BIOS 6.x offers the following enhancements compared to DSP/BIOS 5.x:

• Faster multitasking performance
• Reduced latency for critical interrupts
• Event object
• Customizable memory manager
• Faster, more deterministic variable-sized memory allocation
• Priority-inheritance gates
• Hwi and Swi hook functions
• Up to 32 priority levels
• Extensible tooling
• Per task CPU load
• Support for interrupts and dynamically-created objects in the execution graph
• API parameter checking

Developers can use graphical tools or a text editor to configure SYS/BIOS 6.x and to minimize the memory footprint. Object instances can be created either statically through the configuration or dynamically using API calls. In addition to excluding unused modules, static configuration further reduces the target memory footprint by eliminating the code required to dynamically create and delete operating system objects such as threads and semaphores.

What's Included

• SYS/BIOS 6.x is delivered as part of Code Composer Studio IDE v4 and v5. CCStudio also includes the XDCtools component, which provides the graphical configuration editor and the ROV and RTA tools.
• Purchase of CCStudio includes a royalty-free license to use SYS/BIOS 6.x in your project.
• The SYS/BIOS 6.x, IPC, and XDCtools components may also be downloaded independently of the CCStudio IDE at no charge.

Available Versions

See SYS/BIOS 6.x Download Page (click "Get Software" above) for current and previous versions.