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The advantage is that you can make claims about the maximum time it take to process something. Contrast that to Windows, macos, or Ubuntu that generally are zippy on new hardware, but sometimes the circle spins or the hourglass shows up and makes you wait, possibly for an outsized period of time for what is being processed.

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To make any worthwhile claims you need the worst case execution time of your code. Even in the absence of multi-threading, technologies like caches or out-of-order execution can make this quite painful.

The common solution seems to be: Don't care for some missed values (e.g. non-safety critical systems) or over provisioning (absence of budget pressure).

-> A RTOS alone doesn't give you any reliable claims (but does make a lot of embedded stuff much easier).

What I assume IncRnd is referring to is the deterministic behavior of an RTOS. Here is a good white paper from National Instruments:

http://www.ni.com/white-paper/3938/en/

Thank you. That is a good explanation and is indeed what I meant.

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