Host-compiled multicore RTOS simulator for embedded real-time software development

Parisa Razaghi, Andreas Gerstlauer

Abstract: With increasing demand for higher performance under limited power budgets, multicore processors are rapidly becoming the norm in today's embedded systems. Embedded software constitutes a large portion of today's systems and realtime software design on multicore platforms opens new design challenges. In this paper, we introduce a high-level, host-compiled multicore software simulator that incorporates an abstract real-time operating system (RTOS) model to enable early, fast and accurate software exploration in a symmetric multi-processing (SMP) context. Our proposed model helps designers to explore different scheduling parameters within a framework of a general SMP execution environment. A designer can easily adjust application and OS parameters to evaluate their effect on real-time system performance. We demonstrate the efficiency of our models on a suite of industrial-strength and artificial task sets. Results show that models simulate at up to 1000 MIPS with 1-3% timing error across a variety of different OS configurations.