5. Installation — RTEMS User Manual 5.4-rc2 (21st August 2026) documentation

# 5. Installation

This section details how to set up and install the RTEMS Ecosystem. You will create a set of tools and an RTEMS kernel for your selected Board Support Package (BSP).

You will be asked to follow a few simple steps and when you have finished you will have a development environment set up you can use to build applications for RTEMS. You will have also created a development environment you and a team can adapt for a project of any size and complexity.

RTEMS applications are developed using cross-development tools running on a development computer, more commonlly referred to as the host computer. These are typically your desktop machine or a special build server. All RTEMS tools and runtime libraries are built from source on your host machine. The RTEMS Project does not maintain binary builds of the tools. This may appear to be the opposite to what you normally experience with host operating systems, and it is, however this approach works well. RTEMS is not a host operating system and it is not a distrbution. Providing binary packages for every possible host operating system is too big a task for the RTEMS Project and it is not a good use of core developer time. Their time is better spent making RTEMS better and faster.

The RTEMS Project base installation set ups the tools and the RTEMS kernel for the selected BSPs. The tools run on your host computer are used to compile, link, and format executables so they can run on your target hardware.

The RTEMS Project supports two set ups, release and developer environments. Release installations create the tools and kernel in a single pass ready for you to use. The tools and kernel are stable and only bug fixes are added creating new dot point releases. The developer set up tracks the Git repositories for the tools and kernel.

- 5.1. Releases
  - 5.1.1. RTEMS Tools and Kernel
- 5.2. Developer (Unstable)
  - 5.2.1. POSIX and OS X Host Tools Chain
  - 5.2.2. Windows Host Tool Chain
    - 5.2.2.1. RTEMS Windows Tools
    - 5.2.2.2. Building the Kernel
- 5.3. RTEMS Kernel
  - 5.3.1. Development Sources
  - 5.3.2. Tools Path Set Up
  - 5.3.3. Bootstrapping
  - 5.3.4. Building a BSP
  - 5.3.5. Installing A BSP
  - 5.3.6. Contributing Patches
- 5.4. Project Sandboxing