An RTOS Methodology for NoC Based Systems´ Support -- The HellfireOS Case Study

Modern multi-processor systems-on-a-chip currently count on computational resources previously only seen on general purpose machines. Each more, the evolution on the manufacturing process allows more features to be included on these embedded systems and determine an increased complexity of their hardware and software design. This increase of design complexity requires tools that may reduce the time spent on the development process of several parts that compose these systems. In the final design stages, the application and its properties are represented by tasks and processors managed by an operating system, so a well defined API can be used by developers to explore MPSoC´s computational resources in a fast manner. This work presents a case study of applications running on top of Hellfire OS, and how real-time properties are modeled on the operating system. Different scenarios are presented on the results, involving RTOS performance for common system calls, message passing performance for communicating tasks a dynamic reconfiguration of real-time task sets using load balancing techniques.