-
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.
- 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.
- 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 [email protected] with support from Oliver Schmidt [email protected].
-
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 the example/ subdirectory:
| Filename | Description |
|---|---|
| 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".