Patent 7590990 was granted and assigned to Panasonic on September, 2009 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A general-purpose OS (operating system) is used as a host OS and a real-time OS operating as one or more tasks on the host OS is used as a guest OS. An interrupt handler and a task on the host OS and an interrupt handler and a task on the guest OS issue APIs (application program interfaces) for requesting task state change to a start, stop or like state. An API processor is provided in each OS and outputs an instruction for task state change. An instruction storage for storing instructions output from an API processor of the guest OS in order and outputting the instructions is provided. When interrupt handlers are not in execution, an instruction synchronization timing controller preferentially selects from instructions output from the API processor of the host OS and from the instruction storage the latter and outputs the selected instruction to a scheduler.