The core of eCos is a full-featured, flexible, and configurable real-time kernel.
The kernel provides, among other features, multi-threading, a choice of schedulers, a full set of synchronization primitives, memory allocation primitives, and thread manipulation functions (see the eCos Reference Manual for the full kernel API).
The kernel is carefully designed so that some parts of it (the scheduler, for example) can be changed or replaced without affecting other components of the kernel itself.
The following is a partial list of kernel features:
choice of memory allocation algorithm
choice of scheduling algorithm
a rich set of synchronization primitives
timers, counters, and alarms
interrupt handling
exception handling
cache control
thread support
kernel support for multi-threaded debugging with GDB
trace buffers
infrastructure and instrumentation
The kernel API and configuration are described in the eCos Reference Manual.