DOpE is an acronym for 'Desktop Operating Environment'. It is a windowing system for the real-time operating system DROPS, which is developed at the OS-Group in Dresden. DROPS is based on the microkernel Fiasco (an implementation of the L4 API). DOpE provides the real-time facilities of DROPS at the user interface level. So what does that mean? Real-time? A real-time operating system assures that the processing time demands of certain tasks get satisfied. There are several application areas where such guaranties are needed (or nice to have), such as burning a CDR, multimedia streaming or control systems. A basic property of such tasks is their predicability of their behaviour. They normaly do their tasks periodically by consuming a fixed amount of processing time to effect a fixed amount of data. When interactivity comes into play (this is the case for DOpE), things get tricky because the behaviour of the user is not predicable. Subordinating the user lower than concurrently running real-time tasks is not sufficient since a user has its own demands (reponse latency, ergonomy). DOpE tries to solve this conflict.
