ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates the general concepts of task management and timekeeping, focusing on the RTEMS scheduling algorithms for single-core systems, along with the facilities provided by RTEMS to manipulate tasks and account for the passage of time through its Classic Applications Programming Interface (API).
Chapter 6 will focus on how the same facilities are embodied in the POSIX API. A short comparison between these two APIs, also given in the present chapter, shows their relative advantages and disadvantages, and also highlights which facilities are available only in one API and not in the other.
The chapter ends with a description of some lower-level aspects of interrupt handling on single-core systems by means of the RTEMS Interrupt Manager. Although these aspects are generally outside the scope of general-purpose application programmers, they are often essential in embedded systems. Further information about multicore systems will be provided in Chapters 13.
