Introduction

XMK was designed from the ground up to be very small with respect to ROM, RAM and CPU processing resources. The original targeted platforms were 8bit microcontrollers with only 4K to 8K of ROM and 512 bytes of RAM. XMK has since been scaled up to 16bit and 32bit platforms. Originally it was only a preemptive scheduler with thread synchronization primitives. Now it includes such features as mailboxes, memory pools, file descriptors, hardware device drivers, and TCP/IP networking. Even as XMK has expanded its functionality and scope, it has maintained its extreme minimal philosophy and footprint. Its minimum size is still less than 340 bytes of ROM and 18 bytes of RAM.

What is XMK?

Small. XMK was specifically designed to run on microcontrollers using on the only onboard ROM and RAM.
Configurable. The application only includes the kernel services that are needed.
Scalable. XMK will run on virtually any platform, 8bit, 16bit, and 32bit processors.
Portable. XMK is written in C with only a small amount of target specific assembler for speed and efficiency.
Free. The source can be used freely for commercial and proprietary applications (BSD licensing agreement).

What XMK is not?

NOT a Board Support Package (BSP). The burden of defining the vector table, C start-up code, booting the board, initializing/configuring RAM, etc. falls on the developer and/or the target's development system.
NOT a Debug/Run-time environment. Targets must be loaded and debugged with the tools supplied by their respective development system.
NOT a C/C++ Run-time Library replacement. If the C/C++ Run time libraries are needed, they must be provided by the target's development system.