Decoupling dynamic resource management functions from RTOS for heterogeneous multi-core systems

The complexity of consumer electronics devices have them employ more powerful processors as their processing load becomes higher; thus, their higher power consumption becomes a critical problem. In order to balance processing power and electrical power consumption, heterogeneous multi-core processors are becoming popular. This paper proposes an extensible RTOS (real-time operating system) architecture for such heterogeneous multi-core processors, which consist of processors with different processing power and functionalities. The architecture splits the RTOS kernel into the two components, the proxy kernel (PK) and user-level kernel (UK), and decouples dynamic resource management functions from the PK. Such architecture enables the PK to run on a less powerful core while RTOS can utilize dynamic resource management functions provided by the UK. The experiment results running micro benchmark programs show the feasibility of the proposed architecture.