Unison Operating System

The Unison Operating System is a real-time operating system (RTOS) optimized for system-on-a-chip (SoC), multi-core and digital signal processor (DSP) systems. It is open source. It offers Linux compatibility while being much smaller than Linux. The current version of Unison is completely POSIX compliant, offering application portability and very low cost hardware implementation options primary for embedded microcontrollers, but also for distributed multi-core and multiprocessor systems like autonomous robots and vehicles. It is so tiny that it takes a minimum of 1K byte to run 2 threads.
Unison was developed as a runtime for powerful real-time embedded heterogeneous multiprocessors which were used for military signal processing. The goal was to provide a software infrastructure that would support the construction of inexpensive, lower power, mobile and portable super computers. Upto 256 high performance signal processors were combined in a single portable supercomputer using the Unison RTOS by 1993.
Unison uses the Remedy Debugger, the Eclipse development environment, MPLAB, HEW on Microsoft Windows, Linux and Solaris. It uses the most familiar development environment for users on the platform in question. Unison has common technology and elements with DSPnano RTOS.
Unison has its roots in the Harmony Operating System developed by W. Morven Gentleman, Unix with POSIX in 1994, and pSOS+ developed by Software Components Group.
Unison has a number of industry commercial firsts including:
* RTOS simulator (CopyCat),
* heterogeneous multiprocessor (or multicore) RTOS,
* cross development IDE (Remedy and Composer),
* POSIX RTOS (Unison v2-partial, Unison v3.0),
* threaded RTOS
* graphical time based displays of target system execution
Unison and its associated tools were part of a complete requirements through implementation environment which featured natural language requirements specification, graphical design, object packaging, automatic code generation, flesh editing, system generation and automatic building and debugger inclusion (1989). This commercial offering called CASEworks/RT was the first of its kind, roughly 30 years ahead of the market.
Unison was the flagship product of Multiprocessor Toolsmiths which became RoweBots Research Inc.

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