Costa Mesa, California, March 1, 2016 – Micro Digital is pleased to announce eheap, a new heap designed by an RTOS expert specifically for embedded systems. It is in tune with dominant characteristics of embedded systems:
Wide range of RAM sizes from very small to large.
- Expected to run forever.
- High performance and deterministic operation are required.
- High priority tasks must be able to preempt and run quickly.
- Small code size is often necessary.
- Each embedded system has a relatively narrow range of heap requirements.
- Embedded systems have significant idle time.
- Growing need for self-healing.
eheap is highly customizable to provide the best performance and best fit for each specific embedded system. In addition, it offers comprehensive debug features to help locate and fix heap usage bugs quickly and it offers self-healing to deal with unattended operation in harsh environments.
It has some similarities to dlmalloc, but differs in many regards. In general, dlmalloc is intended to achieve very high performance for desktop and enterprise systems requiring extremely large heaps, whereas eheap is intended to meet the needs of embedded systems. In some cases of interest for embedded systems, eheap actually outperfoms dlmalloc. For a description of how the two work and how they compare, see eheap vs. dlmalloc.
eheap will run on any embedded system, with or without an RTOS. A free source-code evaluation version is available for those who want to try it on their systems. Installation simply requires compiling and linking it ahead of the Standard C Library. To obtain a full source code copy with complete documentation, go to www.smxrtos.com/eheap.
An advantage of using eheap with smx is the ability to display heap statistics and structure with smxAware. Allocated block information, block counts and high water marks, bin population, and other information is shown. The memory map overview display shows the heap blocks graphically, indicating owners, and allowing opening any block to see the data contained.
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Availability and Licensing
eheap is available now. It is part of smx v4.3.1 and is also offered for use with other RTOSes and standalone. It is free for non-commercial use and licensed for $2,000 for commercial use, per developed product. Full source code and other materials are available at www.smxrtos.com/eheap.
About SMX
The focus of the SMX RTOS, and the smx kernel in particular, is to increase safety, security, and reliability of embedded systems, and to offer features, tools, and support needed to ease application development so projects finish on time. This is in contrast to thin RTOS alternatives that have simplistic code, inadequate documentation, superficial debug tools, and poor support.
About Micro Digital
Micro Digital, Inc. has been in the embedded systems business for 40 years and has been producing and selling embedded software products for 27 years. Micro Digital is dedicated to providing quality products and support for embedded systems at moderate prices. We may be contacted at 1-800-366-2491 or sales@smxrtos.com.
