Asymmetric multiprocessing real time operating system on multicore platforms

The need for multi-core architectural trends was realized in the desktop computing domain fairly long back. This trend is also beginning to be seen in the deeply embedded systems such as automotive and avionics industry owing to ever increasing demands in terms of sheer computational bandwidth, responsiveness, reliability and power consumption constraints. The adoption of such multi-core architectures in safety critical systems is often met with resistance owing to the overhead in migration of the existing stable code base to the new system setup, typically requiring extensive re-design. This also brings about the need for exhaustive testing and validation that goes hand in hand with such a migration, especially in safety critical real-time systems.

This project highlights the steps to develop an asymmetric multiprocessing variant of Micrium µC/OS-II real-time operating system suited for a multi-core system. This RTOS variant also supports multi-core synchronization, shared memory management and multi-core messaging queues.

Since such specialized embedded systems are usually developed by system designers focused more so on the functionality than on the coding standards, the adoption of automatic production code generation tools, such as SIMULINK's Embedded Coder, is increasingly becoming the industry norm. Such tools are capable of producing robust, industry compliant code with very little roll out time. This project documents the process of extending SIMULINK's automatic code generation tool for the AMP variant of µC/OS-II on Freescale's MPC5675K, dual-core Microcontroller Unit. This includes code generation from task based models and multi-rate models. Apart from this, it also de-scribes the development of additional software tools to allow semantically consistent communication between task on the same kernel and those across the kernels.