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HACK Real-time Operating System

Highly Accelerated Compact Kernel

HACK-RTOS is free, open-source embedded operating system posed to support all modern Zilog CPU's. The exact list of supported microcontrollers is provided below.

It has started in 2006 as a hobby project. Since then it evolved into a quite powerful RTOS with preemptive multitasking, lots of drivers (UART, I2C, SPI, ADC, EMAC, RTC) and even a TCP/IP stack (eZ80F91). The RTOS has modular structure with many different modules providing services like dynamic memory allocation, inter-thread messages and so on. It relies on a free integrated development environment from Zilog (ZDS-II IDE), so there is no need to spend money. The only thing to lose, if you decide to try it, is your time. Since I don't want you to lose time fruitlessly, I took it upon myself to create reasonable documentation and examples. Every source file of the RTOS starts with a statement saying that I cannot guaranty you anything. The absence of bugs for instance. That is true, but since you are given the sources, you may be able to correct bugs.

In order to make the RTOS as fast as possible I have chosen Assembler as a programming language. The target hardware (especially Z8 Encore! XP) has very little RAM, so the minimization of the memory footprint is critical. This was another reason for choosing Assembler. Finally, I didn't want to be frustrated by bugs in the programming tool. Assembler is simpler than C compiler, and the possibility of running into a bug there is less.

The question I'm most frequently asked is - Why you have chosen Zilog? This firm appears to be sort of a marginal MCU's supplier, shadowed by the big ones like Microchip. I don't much care about that. What is important to me is: they offer free development software of reasonable quality, their development kits are comparably cheap, their chips and tools have good documentation, I like the architecture of their CPU cores (Can you imagine efficient multitasking on MCS-51? I could not), their technical support is not perfect, but at least I am getting my questions answered. Considering all this, I would say Zilog products are good choice for hobbyists like me. Long live Zilog!

My name is Alex Krikunov. I am the owner of this site and the author of HACK-RTOS.
You can reach me by this e-mail: alex@hack-rtos.ru.