Operating Systems Portability: 8 bits and beyond

Embedded software often needs to be ported from one system to another. This may happen for a number of reasons among which are the need for using less expensive hardware or the need for extra resources. Application portability can be achieved through an architecture-independent software/hardware interface. This is not a straight-forward task in the realm of embedded systems, since they often have very specific platforms. This work shows how an application-oriented component-based operating system was developed to allow system and application portability. Case studies present two embedded applications running in different platforms, showing that application source code is totally free of architecture-dependencies