Embedded Software for SoC - Grupo de Mecatrônica EESC/USP

188 Chapter 15
2. RELATED WORK
In general, commercial RTOSes available for popular embedded processors
provide significant reduction in design time. However, they have to be general
and might not be efficient enough for specific applications. To overcome this
disadvantage, some previous work has been done in the area of automatic
RTOS generation [1, 2]. Using these proposed methodologies, the user can
take advantage of many benefits such as a smaller RTOS for embedded
systems, rapid generation of the RTOS, easy configuration of the RTOS and
a more efficient and faster RTOS due to smaller size than commercial RTOSes.
Also, some previous work about automated design of SoC architectures has
been done [3, 4]. However, this previous work mainly focuses on one side
or the other of automatic generation: either software or hardware. In the
methodology proposed in this paper, we focus on the configuration of an RTOS
which may include parts of the RTOS in hardware as well as software.
Previous work in hardware/software partitioning focused on the more
general problem of partitioning an application and typically assumed either a
custom execution paradigm such as co-routines or else assumed a particular
software RTOS [5–7]. In contrast, our work focuses exclusively on RTOS
partitioning among a few pre-defined partitions. The approach presented here
could fit into the prior approaches; specifically, our approach could partition
the RTOS component of the system under consideration.
3. APPROACH
Our framework is designed to provide automatic hardware/software configurability
to support user-directed hardware/software partitioning.
A Graphical User Interface (GUI) (see Figure 15-2) allows the user to select