I want a reply post to the below essay in 250 words using apa format and include at least a reference from journal articles

Question:

Topic: Computerized Operating Systems (OS) are almost everywhere. We encounter them when we use out laptop or desktop computer. We use them when we use our phone or tablet. Find articles that describes the different types of operating systems (Linux, Unix, Android, ROS, z/OS, z/VM, z/VSE, etc). Do not select MS WINDOWS. Write a scholarly review of comparing any two or more OS; attach a copy of the article to your postings. Remember, this assignment is to be scholarly; it is not enough for you to simply post your article and add cursory reviews. Cited references are required.

POST:

Operating systems (OS) are one of the major components of any computing platform today. By abstracting the underlying hardware from the end user, the quick adoption of Operating systems has significantly helped in creating a widespread development of applications in software layer thus helping the advancement of computer technologies over the last 50 years. In the initial stages of this development, only general purposes computers needed operating systems and hence a single OS was built as a scalable software which can span from personal computers all the way to mainframe servers. However, as computing platforms are becoming more diverse (like embedded platforms, industrial and automotive platforms), a single operating system code base is not able to serve the needs of all segments.

One of the segments that is becoming more and more popular with advancements in connectivity is the notion of Internet of Things (IoT). Platforms in IoT devices can range from small inexpensive sensors in farmlands or connected home appliances to big and powerful platforms in industrial machinery. One of the common factors in IoT devices irrespective of the size of platform is the need for reliable and realtime compute capability. Many mission critical tasks are handled by these platforms and hence a real-time capability is a must in these conditions. Traditional operating systems like Windows or MacOS are not built to handle the requirements of IoT devices. To address these issues, a special class of operating systems called Real-time Operating Systems (RTOS) are being developed by various organizations. One such open-source operating system is “Zephyr operating system” that is developed as a open-source project by Linux foundation. In rest of the discussion, I would discuss the features of Zephyr RTOS and compare that to a normal OS like Linux.

Zephyr RTOS is designed with embedded applications in mind and hence the kernel is designed to have a small foot print. The OS itself is designed to support on all major hardware architectures such as Intel-x86, ARM, RSIC-V etc.. Also, it is designed with a modular architecture for independent developers to be able to extend as per their requirements. Because of small memory foot print requirement, there is no distinction on user space and kernel space in the memory management scheme and rather everything is in a unified space as mentioned by Kim & Shin (2018). Also, there are a features to support either preemptive scheduling or co-operative scheduling. Zephyr OS also support multi-threading with support for preemptive and non-preemptive threads with compile time capability to register different interrupts as mentioned in Zephyr Project (2015). This rich feature set combined with the open source nature of the Zephyr project makes it a very attractive option for an RTOS for real-time embedded applications.

In contrast, modern operating systems like Linux or Windows are much more bulkier when compared to Zephyr in terms of memory footprint. For example, latest version of Windows10 takes approximately about 20GB of diskspace as mentioned by Phillips (2019). Also, almost all versions of Linux support the notion of virtual memory and separating user space and kernel space to implement memory protection mechanisms. Because of higher core count on most of the computing platforms, Linux is designed to be multi-threaded by nature and the scheduling algorithms in the kernel always rely on preemption. There is no notion of non-preemtive tasks in a Linux environment.

The comparisons between a real-time OS like Zephyr and general-purpose OS like Linux are present at every level. I have tried to give an outline on the important differences and the reasons for the same. As mentioned above, since both are targeted at different platforms, both versions are needed by hardware software community.