A real-time scratchpad-centric OS with predictable inter/intra-core communication for multi-core embedded systems

Abstract

Multi-core processors have replaced single-core systems in almost every segment of the industry. Unfortunately, their increased complexity often causes a loss of temporal predictability which represents a key requirement for hard real-time systems. Major sources of unpredictability are shared low level resources, such as the memory hierarchy and the I/O subsystem. In this paper, we approach the problem of shared resource arbitration at an OS-level and propose a novel scratchpad-centric OS design for multi-core platforms. In the proposed OS, the predictable usage of shared resources across multiple cores represents a central design-time goal. Hence, we show (i) how contention-free execution of real-time tasks can be achieved on scratchpad-based architectures, and (ii) how a separation of application logic and I/O operations in time domain can be enforced, and (iii) how predictable asynchronous inter/intra-core communication between tasks can be performed. To validate the proposed design, we implemented the proposed OS using commercial-off-the-shelf (MPC5777M) platform. Experimental results show that novel design delivers predictable temporal behavior to hard real-time tasks, and it provides performance gain of upto 2.1× compared to traditional approaches.