One-Shot Time Management Analysis in EPOS

Abstract

One of the tasks of an operating system is to handle time events. Traditionally, time management is based on periodic interrupts from one of the system's hardware timers (ticks). However, this approach has some limitations, as lack of precision, large overhead, and large power consumption. These limitations have motivated the use of non-periodic timers (e.g. one-shot timers), specially in specific-purpose operating systems with timing restrictions, such as embedded, real-time, and multimedia systems. This work presents a comparison between one-shot and periodic time implementations in the time management abstractions in EPOS (embedded parallel operating system). We compare both implementations in terms of memory footprint, number of context switches, number of interrupt handler executions and run time in different execution scenarios.