Symbian, developed in the late 1990s, introduced the EKA2 microkernel, which was an innovative real-time nano-kernel. This kernel did not allocate memory and was capable of running both real-time operating systems and complex applications. Although it had significant advantages, such as operating both applications and the phone stack on a single core, it was overshadowed by the rapid affordability of dual cores in systems on a chip. The official source code for Symbian is available on GitHub, reflecting its legacy amidst technological evolution.
The original Symbian kernel was nothing special, but EKA2 was a thing of beauty. It had a realtime nano-kernel that could run both an RTOS and a richer application stack.
EKA2 was a victim of poor timing: the big advantage was the ability to run both the apps and the phone stack on the same core, but it came along as Arm cores became cheap enough.
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