Tag Archives: RTOS

An Introduction to Hypervisors

Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd
I provide expertise and training for Embedded Linux courses.

I have over 20 years of experience in the embedded sector, gained at companies such as Pace, Open TV and Sony Semiconductor Europe.

I've led work on numerous projects at all stages in the design cycle with comprehensive expertise in software engineering design, support and integration.
Andy McCormick

Hypervisors are becoming commonplace in the embedded world, especially in high-end multi-core systems. If you’d asked me about virtualisation or hypervisors 2 years ago, like most people I didn’t know much about them. A hypervisor, that’s a super-supervisor, right? Virtualisation, you mean Virtual Machines, right? Running Linux on Windows using VMware, right? Not any more!

Here at Feabhas we’ve noticed a lot of our clients and contacts are starting to look at designs using hypervisors in embedded systems for a number of […]

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Debunking priority

Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd
Glennan is an embedded systems and software engineer with over 20 years experience, mostly in high-integrity systems for the defence and aerospace industry.

He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
Glennan Carnie

Before I start, a disclaimer:

For the purposes of this article I’m limiting the discussion to even-driven systems on priority-based, pre-emptive operating systems, on single processors.

I’m using the word task to mean ‘unit of execution’ or ‘unit of schedulability’, in preference to thread or process. I’m ignoring the different OS memory models.

There seems to be a fair amount of misunderstanding about the concept of priority in concurrent programming:

Priority means one task is more ’important’ than another.
Priority allows one task to […]

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Embedded Systems Conference – Silicon Valley

Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall Cooling

As I’m sure you’re well aware, the ash cloud from the Eyjafjallajokull volcano (which began erupting in mid-March) pretty much brought much of European airspace to a standstill over last weekend and into this week. Now that UK airspace has been reopened, it appears I can resume plans for my visit to the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose next week.

The sessions I’m directly involved with are:

Examining ARM’s Cortex Microcontroller Software Interface Standard – CMSIS
Date/Time: Tuesday […]

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Task Synchronisation – Part 2: Multiple Tasks and RTOS APIs

Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall Cooling

First off, apologies for the delay in this follow up to the previous post Task Synchronisation, it has been a mad couple off weeks with a combination of vacation and work.

In the previous post I looked at the foundation of task synchronization demonstrating there are a range of synchronisation models (bilateral/unilateral, persistent/non-persistent, etc.). In this post I shall look at multi-task synchronisation and then investigate specific RTOS APIs.

MULTIPLE TASKS WAITING
So far we have only dealt with the simple case of […]

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Task Synchronisation

Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall Cooling

Synchronisation is an everyday event, both in the real-world and the computer program. For example meeting a friend for a coffee requires synchronisation, in that both parties need to arrive within a given timeframe to make the event worthwhile (sometimes referred to as a rendezvous – however this tends to have more romantic implications). Alternatively, receiving a PO via fax is a form of synchronisation. The company waiting on the PO will-not/cannot start working on the project until this event […]

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Mutex vs. Semaphores – Part 3 (final part): Mutual Exclusion Problems

Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall Cooling

As hopefully you can see from the previous posting, the mutex is a significantly safer mechanism to use for implementing mutual exclusion around shared resources. Nevertheless, there are still a couple of problems that use of the mutex (in preference to the semaphore) will not solve. These are:

Circular deadlock
Non-cooperation

Circular Deadlock
Circular deadlock, often referred to as the “deadly embrace” problem is a condition where two or more tasks develop a circular dependency of mutual exclusion. Simply put, one task is blocked […]

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Mutex vs. Semaphores – Part 2: The Mutex

Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall Cooling

In Part 1 of this series we looked at the history of the binary and counting semaphore, and then went on to discuss some of the associated problem areas. In this posting I aim to show how a different RTOS construct, the mutex, may overcome some, if not all, of these weaknesses.

To address the problems associated with semaphore, a new concept was developed during the late 1980’s. I have struggled to find it’s first clear definition, but the major use […]

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Mutex vs. Semaphores – Part 1: Semaphores

Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall Cooling

It never ceases to amaze me how often I see postings in newsgroups, etc. asking the difference between a semaphore and a mutex. Probably what baffles me more is that over 90% of the time the responses given are either incorrect or missing the key differences. The most often quoted response is that of the “The Toilet Example (c) Copyright 2005, Niclas Winquist” . This summarises the differences as:

A mutex is really a semaphore with value 1

No, no and no […]

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