Automatic Generation of a Real-Time Operating System for Embedded Systems

Abstract

Embedded systems are typically implemented as a set of communicating components some of which are implemented in hardware and some of which are implemented in software. Usually many software components share a processor. A real-time operating system (RTOS) is used to enable sharing and provide a communication mechanism between components. Commercial RTOSs are available for many popular micro-controllers. Using them provides significant reduction in design time and often leads to better structured and more maintainable systems. However, since they have to be quite general, they are not efficient enough for many applications, either in memory usage or in run times. Thus, it is often the case that RTOSs are hand coded by an expert for a particular application. This approach is obviously slow, expensive and error-prone.In this paper we propose an alternative where a RTOS is automatically generated based on a high-level description of the system. RTOSs created in our approach offer an ease of use comparable to commercial RTOSs, and yet since they are generated for a specific example, they can be optimized based on the same information used to optimize hand-written code. We have implemented our approach within POLIS, a system for HW/SW co-design of embedded system. To evaluate the POLIS-generated RTOS we have developed a prototyping environment which we use to compare POLIS against a commercial operating system.