Towards RTOS: A preemptive kernel basing on barrelfish

Abstract

Multi-core or even many-core systems are becoming common. New operating system architectures are needed to meet the ever increasing performance requirements of multi-/many-core based embedded systems. Barrelfish is a multi-/many-core oriented open-source operating system built by ETH Zurich and Microsoft Research in a multi-kernel style. Every kernel runs on a dedicated core with local interrupts disabled, which may result in a failure in real-time systems. To make it preemptive, new kernel state and private kernel stack are added. Capability is the central mechanism of Barrelfish, lots of analyses and modifications have been done to make the duration interrupts are disabled as short as possible when kernel objects in capability space are accessed. As a result, meaningful real-time performance have been obtained. Combined with the inherent scalability of multi-kernel design in Barrelfish, the work in this paper could be a useful reference for multi-/many-core based embedded systems. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.