libosal

🍀 Overview

libosal is a high-performance, modular Operating System Abstraction Layer (OSAL) designed to facilitate cross-platform development by abstracting platform-specific details of operating systems and hardware environments. Developed by the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), libosal enables seamless portability and maintainability of embedded and real-time software components across diverse operating systems including WIN32, MINGW32, PIKEOS, POSIX-compliant systems, and VXWORKS.

By encapsulating OS-dependent functionality behind a uniform API, libosal empowers developers to write hardware-agnostic, reusable, and robust code that is decoupled from platform-specific implementation details, thereby accelerating development cycles and improving software reliability in complex mechatronic and aerospace applications.

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✨ Key Features

• Cross-Platform Compatibility
  Supports a wide range of real-time and general-purpose operating systems such as Windows (WIN32), POSIX-compliant UNIX variants (Linux, macOS), PikeOS microkernel OS, and VxWorks real-time OS. This flexibility allows integration into heterogeneous system landscapes with minimal code modification.

• Modular and Extensible Architecture
  Designed with modularity at its core, libosal can be extended or customized to support new platforms or specialized functionalities while preserving API stability. This modular approach fosters maintainability and ease of integration within complex software stacks.

• Rich API for System Services
  Provides abstractions for critical system services including threading, synchronization primitives, timers, memory management, and device I/O. This facilitates uniform access to essential OS features irrespective of the underlying platform.

• Robust Build System Support
  Supports both Autotools and CMake build environments, enabling smooth integration into diverse CI/CD pipelines and build infrastructures. This ensures consistent and reproducible builds across different development environments.

• Comprehensive Test Suite
  Includes platform-specific and platform-independent test suites, enabling rigorous validation of functionality and performance. Testing infrastructure ensures reliability and correctness across supported platforms.

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📄 Licensing and Contribution

libosal is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0 (LGPL-3.0), enabling both open-source and proprietary usage with compliance.

Contributions are welcome via GitHub pull requests. Please adhere to the project’s Code of Conduct and Contribution Guidelines.

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🤝 Contributing, Contact and Support

Developed and maintained by the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics of the German Aerospace Center (DLR). For inquiries, bug reports, or feature requests, please open an issue on the GitHub repository or contact the maintainers directly.

Contributions, pull requests, and issue reports are always welcome. Please:

• Keep builds warning-free
• Stick to robotkernel style rules
• Add tests for new features or regressions

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Usage

See introduction or gh-pages for reference.

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Install

There's a debian repository hosted by myself where you can automatically install libosal via apt (Ubuntu 22.04, 24.04 and debian bullseye, bookworm). To setup the repository enter:

curl -fsSL https://deb.burger-system.de/setup.sh | bash > /dev/null

Afterwards you should be able to install libosal simply with:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install libosal

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🐊 Build from source

libosal uses autotools as build system. To build from source execute something like:

git clone https://github.com/robert-burger/libosal.git
cd libosal
autoreconf -is
./configure
make
sudo make install

This will build and install a static as well as a dynamic library. For use in other project you can you the generated pkg-config file to retreave cflags and linker flags.

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Build with CMake

mkdir build
cd build
# You can choose MINGW32, POSIX, WIN32, PIKEOS, or VXWORKS. No cross compile currently supported with CMake
cmake -DBUILD_FOR_PLATFORM="POSIX" -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON ..
cmake --build .
# You can define a specific install path with e.g. cmake --install .  --prefix test
cmake --install . 

🧩 Configuration parameters

Parameter	Default	Description
BUILD_FOR_PLATFORM		Select manually your platform (WIN32, MINGW32, PIKEOS, POSIX, or VXWORKS)
BUILD_SHARED_LIBS	OFF	Flag to build shared libraries instead of static ones.
BUILD_WITH_POSITION_INDEPENDENT_CODE	OFF	Flag to build with -fpic option´. Required for shared libs

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🧪 Tests

On POSIX, run

make check

See tests/posix/README.md for details.

For Cissy/Conan, you can also set the option "coverage" to produce coverage analysis in HTML format for the POSIX implementation.