Best IoT Operating Systems

The World’s Leading Real-Time Operating System for the Intelligent Edge For nearly 35 years, VxWorks has been used to ensure the security, safety, and reliability you need to design and build mission-critical embedded systems that simply must work. VxWorks® is the industry’s most trusted and widely deployed real-time operating system (RTOS) for mission-critical embedded systems that must be secure and safe. It delivers a proven, real-time, and deterministic runtime combined with a modern approach to development. Regardless of industry or device type, companies building intelligent edge systems rely on the VxWorks pedigree of security, safety, high performance, and reliability. VxWorks is a deterministic, priority-based preemptive RTOS with low latency and minimal jitter. It is built on an upgradable, future-proof architecture to help you rapidly respond to changing market requirements and technology advancements.

Developed in partnership with the world’s leading chip companies over a 15-year period, and now downloaded every 170 seconds, FreeRTOS is a market-leading real-time operating system (RTOS) for microcontrollers and small microprocessors. Distributed freely under the MIT open source license, FreeRTOS includes a kernel and a growing set of IoT libraries suitable for use across all industry sectors. FreeRTOS is built with an emphasis on reliability and ease of use. With proven robustness, tiny footprint, and wide device support, the FreeRTOS kernel is trusted by world-leading companies as the de facto standard for microcontrollers and small microprocessors. With detailed pre-configured demos and Internet of Things (IoT) reference integrations, there is no need to determine how to setup a project. Quickly download, compile, and get to market faster. Our partner ecosystem provides a breadth of options including community contributions and professional support.

Arm Mbed OS is a free, open-source IoT operating system that includes all the necessary features to develop IoT products. The OS includes everything you need to develop smart, connected products on Arm Cortex-M based hardware, including machine learning capabilities, security, connectivity stacks, an RTOS kernel and drivers for sensors and I/O devices. Arm Mbed OS is designed for the Internet of Things. It is integrated with connectivity, machine learning, networking, and security stacks and is supported with software libraries, development hardware, tutorials and examples. From hardware to the cloud, Mbed OS supports more than 70 silicon, module, cloud, and OEM partners, optimizing your developer choice. By using the Mbed OS API, your application code can remain clean, portable, and simple, while taking advantage of security, communications and machine learning. The integrated solution reduces development cost, time, and risk.

Welcome to the RT-Thread initiative on SourceForge! RT-Thread is a community-led, open-source Real-Time Operating System. It boasts an extensive feature set, compatibility with over 600 ready-to-use software packages and a broad spectrum of components, and supports all mainstream chip architectures. It also includes a proprietary IDE, the RT-Thread Studio, to assist engineers in quickly embarking on embedded and IoT development. Designed with scalability in mind, RT-Thread is a flexible option for various IoT applications, thanks to its Nano version tailored for resource-limited applications. We invite you to join us on this thrilling journey and help shape the future of IoT and RTOS!

LynxOS has been deployed in millions of embedded devices and has operated reliably for 30+ years across multiple safety and security-critical embedded markets. It is a tried and true approach for hosting applications on a Unix-like OS model wherein all resources and application services are centrally managed by a common kernel and is best-suited for working with hardware architectures that predate virtualization. We want our customers to buy what they need, and only what they need. Real-time operating systems can provide a tremendous amount of value, but they are not required for every embedded system design. For a more complete listing of our RTOS-related resources, visit our Embedded Systems Learning Center, which is filled with helpful material for making software purchase decisions as you design or update your system and consider which real-time platform vendor is right for you.

Tizen is an open and flexible operating system built from the ground up to address the needs of all stakeholders of the mobile and connected device ecosystem, including device manufacturers, mobile operators, application developers and independent software vendors (ISVs). Tizen platform is commercialized on smart TVs, smartphones, wearable devices (Gear S, Gear Fit), and smart home appliances. However, low-end and low-cost IoT devices, such as home appliances without display and wearable bands with a small LCD, have received less attention. The objective of TizenRT is to extend the Tizen platform device coverage to these kind of low-end devices.

Huawei LiteOS is an IoT-oriented software platform integrating an IoT operating system and middleware. It is lightweight, with a kernel size of under 10 KB, and consumes very little power — it can run on an AA battery for up to five years! It also allows for fast startup and connectivity and is very secure. These capabilities make Huawei LiteOS a simple yet powerful one-stop software platform for developers, lowering barriers to entry for development and shortening time to market. Huawei LiteOS provides a unified open-source API that can be used in IoT domains as diverse as smart homes, wearables, Internet of Vehicles (IoV), and intelligent manufacturing. Huawei LiteOS enables an open IoT ecosystem, helping partners to quickly develop IoT products and accelerate IoT development.

OpenWrt is a highly extensible GNU/Linux distribution for embedded devices (typically wireless routers). Unlike many other distributions for routers, OpenWrt is built from the ground up to be a full-featured, easily modifiable operating system for embedded devices. In practice, this means that you can have all the features you need with none of the bloat, powered by a modern Linux kernel. Instead of trying to create a single, static firmware, OpenWrt provides a fully writable filesystem with optional package management. This frees you from the restrictions of the application selection and configuration provided by the vendor and allows you to use packages to customize an embedded device to suit any application. For developers, OpenWrt provides a framework to build an application without having to create a complete firmware image and distribution around it.

FreeRTOS is an open source, real-time operating system for microcontrollers that makes small, low-power edge devices easy to program, deploy, secure, connect, and manage. Distributed freely under the MIT open source license, FreeRTOS includes a kernel and a growing set of software libraries suitable for use across industry sectors and applications. This includes securely connecting your small, low-power devices to AWS Cloud services like AWS IoT Core or to more powerful edge devices running AWS IoT Greengrass. FreeRTOS is built with an emphasis on reliability and ease of use, and offers the predictability of long term support releases. A microcontroller contains a simple, resource-constrained processor that can be found in many devices, including appliances, sensors, fitness trackers, industrial automation, and automobiles.

Nucleus® RTOS enables system developers to address the complex requirements demanded by today’s advanced embedded designs. Nucleus brings together kernel-rich functionality and tooling features ideal for applications where a scalable footprint, connectivity, security, power management, and deterministic performance are essential. Nucleus RTOS is a proven, reliable, and fully optimized RTOS. Nucleus has been successfully deployed in highly demanding markets with rigorous safety and security requirements such as industrial systems, medical devices, airborne systems, automotive and more. Stable deterministic kernel with a small memory footprint. A lightweight process model for optimized memory partitioning. Dynamically load and unload processes for greater modularity of applications.

We collaborate with open-source and commercial partners to provide MIPS support for many of the popular Real Time Operating Systems (RTOS) and the new generation of IoT specific Operating Systems. In addition, we have developed the MIPS Embedded Operating System (MEOS) with Virtualization extensions that targets deeply embedded applications and the IoT space. MEOS is MIPS’ in-house real-time operating system (RTOS). Being in-house, it is always the first to support new cores and architecture features. Version 3.1 of MEOS includes a virtualization library to extend MEOS into a hypervisor for use on MIPS cores which implement the MIPS Virtualization module. Where possible we will assist in the development open-source real-time/IoT operating systems through the donation of engineering resource or the supply of development hardware and tools.

From simple embedded environmental sensors and LED wearables to sophisticated embedded controllers, smart watches, and IoT wireless applications. Implements configurable architecture-specific stack-overflow protection, kernel object and device driver permission tracking, and thread isolation with thread-level memory protection on x86, ARC, and ARM architectures, userspace, and memory domains. For platforms without MMU/MPU and memory constrained devices, supports combining application-specific code with a custom kernel to create a monolithic image that gets loaded and executed on a system’s hardware. Both the application code and kernel code execute in a single shared address space.

eLxr Pro from Wind River is a commercial enterprise-grade Linux solution designed for cloud-to-edge deployments, supporting mission-critical workloads like AI, machine learning, and computer vision. Built on the open-source eLxr distribution, eLxr Pro offers flexible, long-term support, security monitoring, and ongoing updates. It ensures compatibility with hardware accelerators and compliance with industry standards. By providing expert consultative services and performance optimizations, eLxr Pro helps businesses scale their edge computing solutions while managing costs, security, and resources effectively.

NuttX is a real-time operating system (RTOS) with an emphasis on standards compliance and small footprint. Scalable from 8-bit to 32-bit microcontroller environments, the primary governing standards in NuttX are Posix and ANSI standards. Additional standard APIs from Unix and other common RTOS’s (such as VxWorks) are adopted for functionality not available under these standards, or for functionality that is not appropriate for deeply-embedded environments (such as fork()). Apache NuttX is an effort undergoing Incubation at The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), sponsored by the Incubator. Incubation is required of all newly accepted projects until a further review indicates that the infrastructure, communications, and decision making process have stabilized in a manner consistent with other successful ASF projects.