Johannes Kath: Acceleration of RTOS components (Hauptseminar)

26.05.2020, 11.00 am

Invitation to the presentation of Johannes Kath

Topic: Acceleration of RTOS components

Project: Hauptseminar

Supervisor: Gökhan Akgün

Abstract: Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOS) are widely used in embedded systems to enable resource management and safe concurrent operation of multiple applications on the system. However, use of an RTOS comes with an overhead and adds latency to the system resources. Today, access to reconfigurable hardware in embedded systems is becoming more and more common, often through integration of an FPGA with the CPU into a Reconfigurable System-on-Chip (RSoC). That is why accelerating RTOS components with dedicated hardware is a promising approach for reducing both the latency of system tasks and the load on the system’s other compute resources. In the last decades many researchers have shown that significant performance increases can be achieved by implementing RTOS components in hardware. These efforts can be categorized in two different ways: the type of circuit used to accelerate the RTOS and the kind of RTOS component that was chosen for acceleration. Although these concepts have been investigated in academia for many years, they have not seen wide spread adoption in commercial products. This is likely due to the increased complexity of developing specialized hardware systems and the additional development time they require. This survey will map the state of the art in RTOS acceleration. It aims to show what kind of improvements were made in recent years and whether they can succeed in making RTOS acceleration more attractive for developers. Questions that will be asked to evaluate the quality of the individual contributions include whether the authors use realistic and comparable benchmarks to evaluate their designs and if they address issues beyond performance improvements, such as the ability to reuse accelerators with different kinds of RTOS.