Programming embedded real-time systems : implementation techniques for concurrent reactive objects

Sammanfattning: An embedded system is a computer system that is a part of a larger device with hardware and mechanical parts. Such a system often has limited resources (such as processing power, memory, and power) and it typically has to meet hard real-time requirements. Today, as the area of application of embedded systems is constantly increasing, resulting in higher demands on system performance and a growing complexity of embedded software, there is a clear trend towards multi-core and multi-processor systems. Such systems are inherently concurrent, but programming concurrent systems using the traditional abstractions (i.e., explicit threads of execution) has been shown to be both difficult and error-prone. The natural solution is to raise the abstraction level and make concurrency implicit, in order to aid the programmer in the task of writing correct code. However, when we raise the abstraction level, there is always an inherent cost. In this thesis we consider one possible concurrency model, the concurrent reactive object approach that offers implicit concurrency at the object level. This model has been implemented in the programming language Timber, which primarily targets development of real-time systems. It is also implemented in TinyTimber, a subset of the C language closely matching Timber’s execution model. We quantify various costs of a TinyTimber implementation of the model (such as context switching and message passing overheads) on a number of hardware platforms and compare them to the costs of the more common thread-based approach. We then demonstrate how some of these costs can be mitigated using stack resource policy. On a separate track, we present a feasibility test for garbage collection in a reactive real-time system with automatic memory management, which is a necessary component for verification of correctness of a real-time system implemented in Timber