Overview of multicore requirements towards real-time communication

Abstract

For embedded systems multicores are becoming more important. The flexibility of multicores is the main reason for this increasing extension. Considering embedded systems are often applied for real-time task, the usage of multicores implicates several problems. This is caused by the architecture of multicore chips. Usually such chips consist of 2 or more cores, a communication bus, I/O's and memory. Exactly the accesses to these resources from a core make it hard to ensure real-time. Therefore, well known mechanisms for resource access must be used, but for sure this is not sufficient enough. Because, a lot of design decisions depend on the applications. As a result, it is mandatory to analyze the requirements of the applications in detail and from the targeted multicore system. The aim of this analysis process is to derive a method for an optimal system design with respect to real-time support. This paper gives an overview of the requirement analysis for multicores and RT scheduling algorithms. Additionally, existing scheduling strategies are reviewed and proposals for new schedulers will be made. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2009.