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Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
VirtuosoNextTM is a distributed real-time operating system
(RTOS) developed and supported by Altreonic NV – an embedded technology focused company. The RTOS finds its origins in Hoare’s CSP process algebra and offers a more generic programming model dubbed Interacting Entities. This paper focuses on these interactions, implemented as
so-called Hubs. Hubs act as synchronisation and communication mechanisms between the application tasks and implement the services provided
by the kernel as a kind of Guarded Protected Action with a well defined
semantics. As in any RTOS, having a predictable behaviour in time is
crucial. While the kernel provides the most basic services, each carefully
designed, tested and optimised, tasks are limited to this handful of basic hubs, leaving the development of more complex synchronization and
communication mechanisms up to application specific implementations.
In this work we investigate how to support a programming paradigm
to compositionally build new services, using notions borrowed from the
Reo coordination language, and relieving tasks from coordination aspects
while delegating them to the hubs. We formalise the semantics of hubs
using an automata model, identify the behaviour of existing hubs, and
propose an approach to build new hubs by composing simpler ones. We
also provide tools and methods to analyse and simplify hubs under our
automata interpretation. In a first experiment several hub interactions
are combined into a single more complex hub, which raises the level of
abstraction and contributes to a higher productivity for the programmer.
Finally, we investigate the impact on the performance by comparing
different implementations on an embedded board.
Description
Keywords
VirtuosoNext TM RTOS
Citation
Publisher
Springer