Development of embedded systems is moving away from single-task/single-user applications running on specialized target platform towards a reduced general purpose OS running on PC-like hardware. This move is well represented by Linux based projects for embedded platforms and specialized minimum distributions. As a sample system and as a basis for development of hard-real-time embedded systems miniRTL was designed. A system that is centered around three major tenets: hard-realtime capabilities, based on FSMLabs' current RTLinux, up-to-date Linux Kernels fully supporting all x86 platforms, maximum compatibility to a “standard” desktop development system. In this paper strategies to reach these goals will be described and the successful application to a running 1.44MB system demonstrated.

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