Operating System's Source-code Porting or Maintenance: Were these forgotten?

Operating System (OS) is the most important software element present in systems based on microprocessors or microcontrollers, thus, i t is right supposed that OS's source-code maintenance are fully supported through many tools. Unfortunately, development methods and tools available are incomplete or do not have the OS as their main focus. OS is very diff erent than regular applications and its development and maintenance are quite special. In this paper we present a survey of methods and tools dealing with OS development and maintenance, and we also present some OS's maintenance tool's requirements in order to define what an application or method should provide support for.