Architecting RTOS for Extensibility by Heterogeneous Multiprocessing with Proxy Kernels

Abstract

This paper proposes an extensible RTOS (real-time operating system) architecture for embedded heterogeneous muti-core processors, which consist of processors with different processing power and functionalities. The architecture splits the RTOS kernel into the two components, the proxy kernel (PK) and user-level kernel (UK). The PK runs on a less powerful core, and delegate its functions to the UK that runs on a powerful core as a user process. The UK takes responsibility for the dynamic resource management functions, thus, the PK can focus on the basic but important RTOS functionalities, such as timing management, synchronization, and dispatching the highest priority process. The experiment results running micro benchmark programs show that the proposed architecture can achieve the faster creation and invocation of processes and that a communication cost between the PK and the UK is negligible.