Abstract:

The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and low-power embedded systems necessitates the use of highly optimized, resource-conscious operating system (OS) kernels. This paper presents the architecture and operational analysis of Mini-Kernel, a didactic OS core implemented as an interactive, web-based simulation using Python and Streamlit. Mini-Kernel effectively models core concurency and resourse managementa  mechanisms, including the structure of the Task Control Block (TCB), the execution of a Round-Robin (RR) preemptive scheduler, and the management of task state transitions across Ready, Running, and Blocked states. By simulating the precise sequence of events initiated by hardware interrupts—specifically Timer Interrupts for preemption and I/O Interrupts for synchronization—the platform provides an accessible, transparent environment for observing the practical effects of context switching overhead and I/O latency. This work serves as a high-fidelity pedagogical tool, bridging the gap between theoretical OS concepts and the implementation requirements of real-time embedded computing (Tanenbaum & Bos, 2015).