October 6, 2016

The Kyu real-time operating system -- Why Kyu?

Why Kyu? Well, why not?

The name

Pronounced like "cue" or "queue". Hopefully the latter will cause no confusion.

The name "kyu" is a japanese word chosen for no particular reason other than it was short and I liked it. Any similarity to "gnu" is purely accidental.

Why do this?

Ultimately, the BBB Kyu project was done simply for fun. I had a previous project (called "skidoo" that ran on the x86) and I was charmed with the BBB, and away we went.

As for why it is the way it is, design choices were based on my experiences with various commercial real time operating systems. I had never had good results with comprehensive operating systems that offered real-time features. In the development phase of a project, having a full set of tools on a full featured linux system was infinitely better than some dodgy editor and compiler on a self hosted, supposedly real-time system. Keeping all of that out of the real time target system allowed a smaller code footprint, and led naturally to a distributed philosophy on the final system. User interfaces and GUI's can run on a linux host and communicate using the network with the target system.


Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Kyu / tom@mmto.org