Customizable and Predictable Synchronization in a Component-Based OS

Component-based operating systems enable embedded systems to adapt system policies, mechanisms, and abstractions to the specific workloads and contexts of each system. The scope of an embedded system developer to customize the software of the system is often limited by the kernel abstractions. For example, synchronization and scheduling policies are often constrained to the static few provided by the kernel. As time-management is an essential aspect of many embedded systems, there is motivation to enable these systems to configure synchronization policies to their needs. In this paper, we present a component-based implementation of system synchronization policies in the COMPOSITE OS. This implementation provides fault-isolation between applications, synchronization mechanisms, and system schedulers while maintaining high levels of performance. Empirical evaluation demonstrates that the proposed primitives have performance comparable to a highly optimized, but uncustomizable futex mech...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: CSREAESA
• Authors: Gabriel Parmer, Jiguo Song
• Keywords: CSREAESA 2010, Embedded Systems, Policies, Synchronization