What follows is a description of an embedded operating system that I have developed on my own. I call my operating system ADEOS (pronounced the same as the Spanish farewell), which is an acronym for "A Decent Embedded Operating System." I think that name really sums it up nicely. Yes, it is an embedded operating system; but it is neither the best nor the worst in any regard. In all, there are less than 1000 lines of source code. Of these, three quarters are platform-independent and written in C++. The rest are hardware– or processor-specific and, therefore, written in assembly language. In the discussion later, I will present and explain all of the routines that are written in C++ along with the theory you need to understand them. In the interest of clarity, I will not present the source code for the assembly language routines. Instead, I will simply state their purpose and assume that interested readers will download and examine that code on their own.

If you would like to use ADEOS (or a modified version of it) in your embedded system, please feel free to do so. In fact, I would very much like to hear from anyone who uses it. I have made every effort to test the code and improve upon the weaknesses I have uncovered. However, I can make no guarantee that the code presented in this chapter is useful for any purpose other than learning about operating systems. If you decide to use it anyway, please be prepared to spend some amount of your time finding and fixing bugs in the operating system itself.