Real time on one chip

Why this conversation

A robot arm or a piece of medical equipment needs parts of its software to respond within hard deadlines, and other parts that want a full Linux system. At Open Source Summit Europe in Prague, the host stopped at the openEuler booth, where a member of the openEuler Embedded team explained how the project puts both on the same chip. It is a short walk-through, about four minutes, in front of the booth screen. The rest of the week is in Open Source Summit Europe 2026: who we met.

Linux and an RTOS on one chip

openEuler Embedded is the openEuler system for embedded scenarios: industrial control, embodied intelligence and other kinds of control. “So the things that we focus on is more like the real-time feature,” the team explained: lower latency and faster response.

To get there, the project has a mixed criticality deployment framework, which deploys different kinds of systems on one SoC at the same time. The soft real-time zone can run Linux with the real-time patch, which gives a lower real-time level. The hard real-time zone runs an RTOS. The project already offers several, among them Zephyr and UniProton, and if you want another RTOS on the platform, the team can adapt it.

The hardware

After a brief hitch with the booth screen, the conversation turned to where the system runs. The northbound equipment includes machine arms, robots, medical equipment and power equipment. Underneath, openEuler Embedded supports different SoC architectures. The host asked about one of them, LoongArch, which the team described as hardware developed by a company in China. RISC-V and MCUs are supported too. You can deploy on a single architecture, or across heterogeneous CPUs, GPUs and other processing units.

Getting the code

The code is in a repository on AtomGit, with a mirror on GitHub. “It’s fully open source out there,” so you can download it and try it. The project also has an agentic engineering framework: agent skills that let you explore the code from an AI environment, or help you work with the system as a user.

openEuler itself is on openEuler: the people on Udienza.