HcM-FreeRTOS: Hardware-centric FreeRTOS for ARM multicore

Esam A. Al Qaralleh, Diogo Lima, Tiago Gomes, Adriano Tavares, Sandro Pinto

Abstract: Migration to multicore is inevitable. To harness the potential of this technology, embedded system designers need to have available operating systems (OSes) with built-in capabilities for multicore hardware. When designed to meet real-time requirements, multicore SMP (Symmetric Multiprocessing) OSes not only face the inherent problem of concurrent access to shared kernel resources, but still suffer from a bifid priority space, dictated by the co-existence of threads and interrupts. This work in progress paper presents the offloading of the FreeRTOS kernel components to a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) multicore hardware. The ARM Generic Interrupt Controller (GIC) is exploited to implement a multicore hardware-centric version of the FreeRTOS that not only solves the priority inversion problem, but also removes the need of internal software synchronization points. Promising preliminary results on performance and determinism are presented, and the research roadmap is discussed.