| Protothreads are extremely lightweight stackless threads designed for |
| severely memory constrained systems such as small embedded systems or |
| sensor network nodes. Protothreads can be used with or without an |
| underlying operating system. |
| |
| Protothreads provides a blocking context on top of an event-driven |
| system, without the overhead of per-thread stacks. The purpose of |
| protothreads is to implement sequential flow of control without |
| complex state machines or full multi-threading. |
| |
| Main features: |
| |
| * No machine specific code - the protothreads library is pure C |
| * Does not use error-prone functions such as longjmp() |
| * Very small RAM overhead - only two bytes per protothread |
| * Can be used with or without an OS |
| * Provides blocking wait without full multi-threading or |
| stack-switching |
| * Freely available under a BSD-like open source license |
| |
| Example applications: |
| |
| * Memory constrained systems |
| * Event-driven protocol stacks |
| * Small embedded systems |
| * Sensor network nodes |
| |
| The protothreads library is released under an open source BSD-style |
| license that allows for both non-commercial and commercial usage. The |
| only requirement is that credit is given. |
| |
| The protothreads library was written by Adam Dunkels <adam@sics.se> |
| with support from Oliver Schmidt <ol.sc@web.de>. |
| |
| More information and new versions can be found at the protothreads |
| homepage: |
| http://www.sics.se/~adam/pt/ |
| |
| Documentation can be found in the doc/ subdirectory. |
| |
| Two example programs illustrating the use of protothreads can be found |
| in this directory: |
| |
| example-small.c A small example showing how to use protothreads |
| example-buffer.c The bounded buffer problem with protothreads |
| example-codelock.c A code lock with simulated key input |
| |
| To compile the examples, simply run "make". |
| |
| |
| Adam Dunkels, 3 June 2006 |
