µC/OS
More info
- Creator
- Jean J. Labrosse
- Released
- 1992
- Type
- Real-time kernel
- License
- Apache 2.0 (since 2020)
The real-time kernel that started life as a magazine article and ended up in avionics and medical devices.
Jean Labrosse published the kernel in 1992 in Embedded Systems Programming magazine and followed it with a book that explained every line of the source. That made µC/OS the textbook for a generation of firmware engineers: a small preemptive kernel with a fixed priority per task, semaphores, queues and scheduling you could reason about.
Labrosse founded Micrium to sell it. µC/OS-II was certified for DO-178B and went into avionics and medical equipment, where paperwork proving correctness counts for more than features. µC/OS-III allowed several tasks at the same priority. Silicon Labs bought Micrium in 2016 and released the code under Apache 2.0 in 2020, by which time FreeRTOS had already won the hobbyist crowd.