Overview

Huawei LiteOS is a real-time kernel–based lightweight operating system developed by Huawei for
the IoT. The basic kernel of Huawei LiteOS is compatible with basic operating system components,
such as task, memory, time, interrupt, queue, and event management components, communication
mechanisms, and timers, to better support low power consumption scenarios. In addition, the basic
kernel enables time alignment of timers using the tickless mechanism.

Focusing on the NB-IoT market, Huawei LiteOS has helped partners build open source IoT
ecosystems in technology, ecosystem, solution, commercial use, and other aspects. Currently,
Huawei LiteOS has cooperated with more than 30 MCU and solution partners to launch a series of
open source development kits and industry solutions, which help customers quickly launch IoT
terminals and services. Such customers are involved in multiple industries, such as meter reading,
parking, street lamp, environmental protection, bicycle sharing, and logistics. Moreover, Huawei
LiteOS provides developers with a one-stop software platform, lowering development requirements
and improving development efficiency.

Highlights of Huawei LiteOS Kernel

Huawei LiteOS is a lightweight real-time operating system.
Basic kernel of Huawei LiteOS is the most tidy code of operating system. It contains operating
system components based task management, memory management, time management,
communication mechanism, interrupt management, queue management, event management,
timer, etc. It can run independently.

Highlight real-time and stable

Ultra-small kernel, basic kernel size of less than 10 KB

Low power consumption

Capable of Static function compaction

Module Introduction

Task
Creates, deletes, delays, suspends, and resumes tasks, and can lock or unlock taskscheduling. High
priority tasks preempt resources from low priority ones. Tasks of the same priority share resources
in a round robin setup using time slicing.

Task Synchronization
Semaphore: creates, deletes, pends on, and releases semaphores.

Mutex: creates, deletes, pends on, and releases mutexes.

Hardware Related Functions

Provides the following functions:

Interrupt: Creates, deletes, enables, and disables interrupts; clears interrupt request flags.

Timer: Creates, deletes, starts, and stops timers.

Inter-Process Communication (IPC)

Provides the following functions:

Event: Reads and writes events.

Message queue: Creates, deletes, reads from, and writes into message queues.

Time Management
System time: generated when an output pulse of a timer/counter triggers an interrupt.

Tick time: the basic time unit used in OS scheduling. The tick length is user configurable.
Typically, it is determined by the system clock speed and represented in the form of ticks per
second.

Software timer: The timer length is measured in ticks. The Timer_Callback function (a function
used to process timer expiry) is called when a soft tick interrupt is generated.

Memory Management
Provide two algorithms of dynamic memory and static memory. Allocates or
frees memory statically using the Membox algorithm or dynamically using the SLAB algorithm
 and DLINK algorithm.

Provides memory statistics, cross-border detection memory.

Huawei LiteOS Kernel Supported Cores

Cores supported by Huawei LiteOS

Core Chip

STM32L053R8Tx ATSAMD21G18A ATSAMD21J18A ATSAMR21G18A

Cortex-
EFM32HG322F64 MKL26Z128 MKW41Z512 LPC824M201JHI33 MM32L073PF
A7
nRF51822 NANO130KE3BN

K3V3 and K3V3+STM32F103RB ATSAM4SD32C EFM32GG990F1024

Cortex-
GD32F103VCT6 GD32150R8 GD32F190R8 GD32F207VC MM32F103CBT6
M3
MM32L373PS

STM32F411, STM32F412, STM32L476, STM32F429, and STM476STM32F411RE

Cortex- STM32F412ZG STM32F429ZI STM32F429IG STM32L476RG
M4 EFM32PG1B200F256GM48 GD32F450IK CC3220SF LPC54114j256BD64 nRF52840
nRF52832 NUC472HI8AE ATSAMG55J19 ADuCM4050LF

Cortex-
K3V5 and STM32F746STM32F746ZG ATSAME70Q21
M7

Constraints
Both Huawei LiteOS interfaces and CMSIS interfaces are supported, but hybrid use of them may
lead to unpredictable results. (For example, a CMSIS interface is used for requesting semaphores
while a Huawei LiteOS interface is used for releasing semaphores.)

Use only Huawei LiteOS interfaces for driver development. CMSIS interfaces are recommended
for app development.