Toppers project
The TOPPERS Project is to develop a series of open source real-time operating systems (RTOS) for embedded systems. The TOPPERS/JSP Kernel, which is the first product of the project, was released two years ago and is started to be used in industries. A technological basis of the TOPPERS Project is the ITRON Specification, which is a de-facto standard real-time kernel specification widely applied to consumer electronics, cellular phones, and other small-scale embedded systems in Japan.
TOPPERS Project
The TOPPERS Project is to develop a series of open source RTOS and related software based on the ITRON Specifications [8]. The project is initiated by us in 2000 and is now supported by several companies, research institutes, and individuals. We plan to incorporate the project in near future. The aims of the TOPPERS Project is as follows. At first, the existence of an open source real-time kernel can ease the problem of excessive diversity and another ITRON’s problem of duplicated efforts that more than ten companies have developed and are maintaining ITRON-specification real-time kernels independently. Another aim is to develop the next generation RTOS technology. Again, open source software facilitates to bring development resources together both from industries and academia. The last (but not least) aim is to ease the training of embedded software engineers through providing good education materials.
The license condition of the products of the TOPPERS Project is called the TOPPERS license, which is similar to the BSD license condition and is much more unrestricted than the GNU General Public License (GPL). The basic concept of the TOPPERS license is to promote the wide use of the TOPPERS software while collecting information for claiming the contribution of the project. When an RTOS under the TOPPERS license is embedded in a device, for example, the developer has only to report the usage of the RTOS to the TOPPERS Project. We call this concept as reportware.
The TOPPERS/JSP Kernel, which is a real-time kernel conformant to the Standard Profile of the μITRON4.0 Specification, is the first product of the TOPPERS Project. We have developed the JSP Kernel as the basis of our research and education. Based on the JSP Kernel, we are proceeding several research projects. The JSP Kernel is also used in the industries for prototype development of embedded systems and also for final products.
We are also developing RTOS with extended functionalities. One of them is the IIMP Kernel, which is an extension of the JSP Kernel with the access protection function of kernel objects including memory objects. Another product is the IDL Kernel, an extension of the IIMP Kernel with dynamic object creation and deletion, on which dynamic loading function has been implemented.
Another development area of the TOPPERS Project is software components running on the ITRON-specification real-time kernels. One of them is a compact TCP/IP protocol stack conforming to the ITRON TCP/IP API Specification.