Hardware/software partitioning of operating systems: A behavioral synthesis approach
Additional information
Authors
Chandra S.,
Regazzoni F.,
Lajolo M.
Type
Article in conference proceedings
Year
2006
Language
English
Abstract
In this paper we propose a hardware real time operating system(HW-RTOS) solution that makes use of a dedicated hardware in order to replace the standard support provided by the POSIX layer of a general purpose RTOS for implementing task synchronization and scheduling. By redefining only the I/O APIs of the tasks, the HW-RTOS then takes care of the communication requirements of the original application and also implements the task scheduling algorithm. The new software application can then be compiled without any need for POSIX support. The main advantages are smaller and faster executables. We present results that show how a small hardware area, less than 10K gates, can result in a 15X performance improvement when the original software scheduler is replaced by a dedicated HW-RTOS.
Conference proceedings
GLSVLSI ''06: Proceedings of the 16th ACM Great Lakes symposium on VLSI
Publisher
ACM Press, New York, USA
Start page number
324
End page number
329
Meeting place
Philadelphia, PA, USA
ISBN
1-59593-347-6
Keywords
HW/SW co-design, real time operating systems, system-on-chip (SoC)
