Implementing Hybrid Operating Systems with Two-Level Hardware Interrupts

In this paper, we propose to implement hybrid operating systems based on two-level hardware interrupts. To separate real-time and non-real-time hardware interrupts by hardware, we show that it is easier to build up hybrid systems with better performance. We analyze and discuss the key issues for implementing a hybrid system based on this and implement a hybrid system called RTLinux-THIN (Real-Time LINUX with Two-level Hardware INterrupts) on the ARM architecture by combining ARM Linux kernel 2.6.9 and C/OS-II. We conduct experiments on a set of real application programs including mplayer [20], Bonnie [4] and iperf [13] and compare the interrupt latency distributions for RTLinux-THIN (with and without cache locking), RTAI and Linux on a hardware platform based on Intel PXA270 processor [12]. The experimental results show that RTLinux-THIN improves real-time interrupt latencies and provides better predictability.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: RTSS
• Authors: Miao Liu, Zili Shao, Meng Wang, Hongxing Wei, Tianmiao Wang
• Keywords: Applied Computing, Hardware Interrupts, Hybrid System, RTSS 2007, Two-level Hardware Interrupts