Measurement, Analysis and Modeling of RTOS System Calls Timing

This paper presents a methodology for accurately characterizing the system calls of an operating system for embedded applications. Characterization consists of two phases: measurements and modeling. Measurements allow a coarse-grained quantitative comparison of different operating systems. Models, on the other hand, have been derived to gain a more detailed view of the behavior of a RTOS. Furthermore, they have been used within a source-level execution time estimation framework and their accuracy and usefulness proved through benchmarking. The measurement framework is based on two prototyping boards based on Xilinx and Altera devices and the timing characterization has been performed on two real-time operating systems: VxWorks and RTEMS.