contiki/doc/contiki-mainpage.txt

/**

\mainpage The Contiki Operating System 2.x

\author Adam Dunkels <adam@sics.se>

Contiki is an open source, highly portable, multi-tasking operating
system for memory-constrained networked embedded systems written by
Adam Dunkels at the Networked Embedded Systems group at the Swedish
Institute of Computer Science.

Contiki is designed for embedded systems with small amounts of
memory. A typical Contiki configuration is 2 kilobytes of RAM and 40
kilobytes of ROM. Contiki consists of an event-driven kernel on top of
which application programs are dynamically loaded and unloaded at
runtime. Contiki processes use light-weight protothreads that provide
a linear, thread-like programming style on top of the event-driven
kernel. Contiki also supports per-process optional preemptive
multi-threading, interprocess communication using message passing
through events, as well as an optional GUI subsystem with either
direct graphic support for locally connected terminals or networked
virtual display with VNC or over Telnet.

Contiki contains two communication stacks: uIP and Rime. uIP is a
small RFC-compliant TCP/IP stack that makes it possible for Contiki to
communicate over the Internet. Rime is a lightweight communication
stack designed for low-power radios. Rime provides a wide range of
communication primitives, from best-effort local area broadcast, to
reliable multi-hop bulk data flooding.

Contiki runs on a variety of platform ranging from embedded
microcontrollers such as the MSP430 and the AVR to old
homecomputers. Code footprint is on the order of kilobytes and memory
usage can be configured to be as low as tens of bytes.

Contiki is written in the C programming language and is freely
available as open source under a BSD-style license. More information
about Contiki can be found at the Contiki home page:
http://www.sics.se/contiki/


\section contiki-mainpage-tcpip TCP/IP

Contiki includes the uIP TCP/IP stack (http://www.sics.se/~adam/uip/)
that provides Contiki with TCP/IP networking support. uIP provides the
protocols TCP, UDP, IP, and ARP.

\sa \ref uip "The uIP TCP/IP stack documentation"
\sa \ref tcpip "The Contiki/uIP interface"
\sa \ref psock "Protosockets library"

\section contiki-mainpage-rime Rime

Rime is a lightweight communication stacks designed for low-power
radios. Rime provides a wide range of communication primitives
suitable for implementing communication-bound applications or network
protocols.

\sa \ref rime "The Rime Communication Stack"

\section contiki-mainpage-threads Multi-threading and protothreads

Contiki is based on an event-driven kernel but provides support for
both multi-threading and a lightweight stackless thread-like construct
called protothreads.

\sa \ref process "Contiki processes"
\sa \ref pt "Protothreads"
\sa \ref etimer "Event timers"
\sa \ref mt "Optional multi-threading"

\section contiki-mainpage-lib Libraries

Contiki provides a set of convenience libraries for memory management
and linked list operations.

\sa \ref timer "Simple timer library"
\sa \ref memb "Memory block management"
\sa \ref list "Linked list library"

\section contiki-mainpage-getting-started Getting started with Contiki

Contiki is designed to run on many different \ref platform "platforms". It is also
possible to compile and build both the Contiki system and Contiki
applications on many different development platforms. 

See \ref esb-getting-started "Getting started with Contiki for the ESB platform

\section contiki-mainpage-building Building the Contiki system and its applications

 The Contiki build system is designed to make it easy to compile
 Contiki applications for either to a hardware platform or into a
 simulation platform by simply supplying different parameters to the
 <tt>make</tt> command, without having to edit makefiles or modify
 the application code.

See \ref buildsystem 


*/