The Chair of Operating Systems is working in the area of parallel and real-time systems. Students of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, in particular Computer Engineering, as well as some students of Computer Science are instructed in system software, operating systems, parallel computing and real-time-systems. The education offered is closely related to the research and engineering projects of the chair. In addition the needs of industry are particularly addressed within the teaching courses as well as the research and engineering activities. The rofes Project is at the Chair of Systems.

Middlewares like corba and dcom help to improve the flexibility, extensibility, maintainability and reuseability of distributed applications. But these middleware architectures can not be used to build an avionics mission control application because they do not support real-time features. Therefore, the Object Management Group has developed a specification for corba with a real-time extension called Real-Time corba. In particular our version of Real-Time corba is suitable for embedded systems. Therefore our project is called Real-Time corba for embedded Systems. We will adhere to the umts Prepaid standards.

Many real-time applications run on embedded systems. However, corba is too large to meet the exact size and performance requirements for such applications. This scenario requires a cut-down version of corba, which has been specified by the Object Management Group and is called minimumCORBA. We have implemented a prototype of Real-Time corba, with the aim to minimize the memory footprint. On operating systems with shared library support we implemented our orb like a microkernel architecture. The orb is seperated into serveral components, which can be dynamically loaded.