Advanced medical instrument-oriented operating system

The directions of advanced medical instrument system are multi-function, multi-parameter, intelligence, and network. To provide a more excellent hardware and software supporting environment for this trend, we have developed an instrument-oriented weak real-time distributed operating system (IOWRTDOS). From the bottom to the top it consists of three layers: the general hardware interface (GHI), the microkernel and the global shared object (GSO). GHI encapsulates the hardware and presents an idealized machine architecture to the rest of the operating system. Microkernel, as the core of IOWRTDOS, provides basic mechanisms of the operating system such as memory, multithread and interrupt management. GSO transcends the physical boundaries between the processor nodes by making use of a few global shared objects and presents the system with a transparent distributed processing capability. Because the system integrates layer model and microkernel model in the architecture design and takes object-oriented technique during the analysis and implementation, it has many advantages such as flexible architecture, excellent modularity, easy portability, free extensibility and good performance-price ratios. Here, the architecture of IOWRTDOS, especially its design and implementation, is discussed in detail