Ptask: An Educational C Library for Programming Real-Time Systems on Linux

When learning real-time programming, the novice is faced with many technical difficulties due to low-level C libraries that require considerable programming effort even for implementing a simple periodic task. For example, the POSIX Real-Time standard only provides a low level notion of thread, hence programmers usually build higher level code on top of the POSIX API, every time re-inventing the wheel. In this paper we present a simple C library that simplifies realtime programming in Linux by hiding low-level details of task creation, allocation and synchronization, and provides utilities for more high-level functionalities, like support for mode-change and adaptive systems. The library is released as open-source and it is currently being employed to teach real-time programming in university courses in embedded systems.