Operating Systems

Android on an industrial device is a different exercise from Android on a phone. The framework assumes a touchscreen, a battery and an app store, and an embedded product usually has none of the three. What it does bring is a mature graphics stack, a driver model and a security architecture.

Working below the application layer means dealing with the HAL, Binder, the init sequence and the AOSP build system. Porting Android to a board is mostly about understanding what the framework expects from the hardware, and what it will do when the hardware answers differently.

Our courses cover Android programming, the internals of the platform from the kernel up to the framework, and the specific case of industrial system control where Android runs without a user in front of it.

Embedded Linux is not a smaller desktop Linux. It is a kernel you configure, a root filesystem you assemble yourself, and a boot chain you have to understand from the first instruction the SoC executes. Nothing is installed for you.

Two build systems dominate. Yocto produces a distribution you control layer by layer, reproducible and maintainable over years, at the cost of a real learning curve. Buildroot gets you an image in minutes and stays readable. Above that sit driver development, the real-time patches, power management and the graphical stacks.

Our courses cover user-space programming, kernel and driver development, the Yocto project from first build to expert usage, real-time Linux, USB and power management drivers, and embedded graphical interfaces with Qt. Lab work runs on real targets with a JTAG probe.

A real-time operating system does not make code run faster. It makes timing predictable. On a microcontroller, a main loop works until a long task has to share the processor with a response due in milliseconds. An RTOS arbitrates that, with priority scheduling, synchronization primitives and time management.

Our courses cover the three kernels used across embedded projects: FreeRTOS for compact multitasking, Zephyr for its full ecosystem with Devicetree, Kconfig and West, and Eclipse ThreadX where certification drives the choice. Each session is built around lab work on real or simulated targets.

Each kernel answers the same questions differently: how a task blocks, how memory is allocated or refused, how an interrupt hands work to a task, and what happens when two of them contend. The courses go through the scheduler behavior, the synchronization primitives and the tracing tools that show what the system actually did.

What is Zephyr?

Zephyr is an open-source RTOS specifically designed for embedded systems and IoT. Drawing on the strengths of Linux and tailored for microcontrollers, it enables you to write portable applications across multiple vendor platforms thanks to its build system, Kconfig, and devicetree.

Many built-in drivers speed up development by providing support for a wide range of peripherals out of the box. With Zephyr, developers can focus on building applications without worrying about porting or rewriting low-level code.

Our Zephyr training courses help you master the ecosystem: the device tree, the device driver model, and everything that sets Zephyr apart from other real-time operating systems.

L'écriture de drivers (ou pilotes de périphériques) est une activité très importante, et souvent critique, en environnement embarqué.

Nous proposons des cours adaptés aux spécificités du développement de drivers en environnement embarqué, avec des exercices utilisant, chaque fois que nécessaire, des environnement de développement croisés et des cartes cibles industrielles.