Hardware/software partitioning of operating systems: a behavioral synthesis approach

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. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.4.8 [Operating Systems]: Performance; C.5.4 [Computer System Implementation]: VLSI Systems General Terms Design, Algorithms, Experimentation, Performance Keywords Opera...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: GLVLSI
• Authors: Sathish Chandra, Francesco Regazzoni, Marcello Lajolo
• Keywords: General Purpose Rtos, GLVLSI 2006, Operating Systems, Real Time Operating System, VLSI