A comparative analysis of RTOS and linux scalability on an embedded many-core processor

Abstract

Current embedded systems are usually based on real-time operating system (RTOS). In the near future, embedded systems will include parallel applications for tasks like autonomous driving, and adopt many-core processors to satisfy the performance requirements. However, traditional RTOSes are not designed for high performance applications and whether they can scale well on many-core processors remains unclear. Meanwhile, research has shown that Linux can provide good scalability for processors with tens of cores. In this paper, an experiment environment based on a traditional multi-core RTOS (TOPPERS/FMP) and an off-the-shelf 72-core many-core processor (TILE-Gx72) is presented. By a comparative analysis of RTOS based and Linux based runtime systems, several bottlenecks in RTOS are identified and the methods to avoid them are proposed. After that, the PARSEC benchmark suite is used to evaluate the performance of RTOS and Linux. The results show that the optimized RTOS runtime system tends to deliver better scalability than Linux in many cases. Therefore, we believe that traditional RTOS like TOPPERS/FMP can still be a good choice for embedded many-core processors in the near future.