Design of Mini Multi-Process Micro-Kernel Embedded OS on ARM

Abstract

This paper describes the design and implementation of a mini multi-process micro-kernel embedded Unix-like operating system on ARM platform in technical details, including MMU and memory space mapping, init process, inter-process communication, process management, TTY and tiny shell, multi-level priority-queue schedule, and signaling. The mini OS is developed on Linux platform with GNU tool chain by the author of this paper. The architecture of the mini OS is analogous to that of Minix. Based on it, other operating system components such as file system, network management, and copy-on-write can be appended to form a full-featured embedded operating system. The mini OS can be used for both embedded system application development and related curriculum teaching.