Overview

A cFS mission is a collection of applications running on a shared bus, scheduled by the real-time OS, and managed by Executive Services. Every mission follows the same structural pattern regardless of what the spacecraft actually does — the mission-specific behavior lives entirely in the apps and their configuration.

• Structure — what a mission is made of: apps, libraries, tables, and the build process
• Deployment — updating apps and configuration on a running spacecraft
• Scheduling — time-driven execution model and deterministic CPU allocation
• Communication — how apps exchange data through the bus
• Identification — spacecraft IDs, APIDs, and message routing
• Time — how the spacecraft knows what time it is and stays synchronized
• Processor — hardware assumptions: word size, endianness, radiation, no MMU
• Fault Tolerance — error detection and recovery, from bit flips to app crashes
• Memory — bounded, pre-allocated memory without a general-purpose heap