Support for Legacy Real-Time Applications in an HSF-Enabled FreeRTOS - a technical report

• This paper presents a runtime support to consolidate legacy together with other real-time applications, running a single instance of a real-time operating system (RTOS), and sharing system resources. In this context, we resort to the hierarchical scheduling framework (HSF) to provide tem- poral partitions for dierent applications, supporting their independent development and real-time analysis, thus resulting on a predictable inte- gration. In particular, the paper focuses on a constructive element, the legacy server that allows executing code that is unaware of the temporal partition within which it is deployed. Furthermore, we discuss the chal- lenges that need to be addressed to execute a legacy application in an HSF without modications to the original code. We focus on the chal- lenge of enabling sharing system resources, both hardware and software, as typically found in most industrial software systems. We propose a novel solution based on wrappers for the required RTOS system calls. We implement our ideas in a concrete implementation on FreeRTOS OS, taking advantage of a prior HSF implementation. The validation is performed by a proof-of-concept case study that shows a successful integration of a legacy application that uses shared resources in a system that executes other applications. 

Subject headings

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik -- Inbäddad systemteknik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering -- Embedded Systems (hsv//eng)

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik -- Datorsystem (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering -- Computer Systems (hsv//eng)

Keyword

real-time systems

hierarchical scheduling

legacy application reuse

applications integration

Computer Science

datavetenskap

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

rap (subject category)