Abstract-Lightweight Real-Time Operating Systems have gained widespread use in implementing embedded software on lightweight nodes. However, bare metal solutions are chosen, e.g., when the reactive (interrupt-driven) paradigm better matches the programmer's intent, when the OS features are not needed, or when the OS overhead is deemed too large. Moreover, other approaches are used when real-time guarantees are required. Establishing real-time and resource guarantees typically requires expert knowledge in the field, as no turn-key solutions are available to the masses.In this paper we set out to bridge the gap between bare metal solutions and traditional Real-Time OS paradigms. Our goal is to meet the intuition of the programmer and at the same time provide a resource-efficient (w.r.t. CPU and memory) implementation with established properties, such as bounded memory usage and guaranteed response times. We outline a roadmap for Real-Time For the Masses (RTFM) and report on the first step: an intuitive, platform-independent programming API backed by an efficient Stack Resource Policy-based scheduler and a tool for kernel configuration and basic resource and timing analysis.

The key to successful deployment of garbage collection in real-time systems is to enable provably safe schedulability tests of the real-time tasks. At the same time one must be able to determine the total heap usage of the system. Schedulability tests typically require a uniformed model of timing assumptions (inter-arrival times, deadlines, etc.). Incorporating the cost of garbage collection in such tests typically requires both artificial timing assumptions of the garbage collector and restricted capabilities of the task scheduler. In this paper, we pursue a different approach. We show how the reactive object model of the programming language Timber enables us to decouple the cost of a concurrently running copying garbage collector from the schedulability of the real-time tasks. I.e., we enable any regular schedulability analysis without the need of incorporating the cost of an interfering garbage collector. We present the garbage collection demand analysis, which determines if the garbage collector can be feasibly scheduled in the system.

Abstract-For the future we foresee each vehicle to feature wireless communication (to the Internet and/or other vehicles) over various technologies, e.g., UMTS/GPRS, and WLAN/WiFi. In this paper we show how access to such communication resources could be granted to individual components (CAN bus connected ECUs) in the car by allowing transparent data transport using the standardized Internet Protocol (IP). Our experiments show that a complete IP Over CAN implementation, providing both UDP and TCP transport over IP, running on an Atmel AT90CAN128 is capable of transfer speeds up to 200 kbits while using less than 2 kbytes of dynamic RAM.

Embedded systems are often operating under hard real-time constraints. Such systems are naturally described as time-bound reactions to external events, a point of view made manifest in the high-level programming and systems modeling language Timber.In this paper we demonstrate how the Timber semantics for parallel reactive objects translates to embedded real-time programming in C. This is accomplished through the use of a minimalistic Timber Run-Time system, TinyTimber (TT). The TT kernel ensures state integrity, and performs scheduling of events based on given time-bounds in compliance with the Timber semantics. In this way, we avoid the volatile task of explicitly coding parallelism in terms of processes/threads/semaphores/monitors, and side-step the delicate task to encode time-bounds into priorities.In this paper, the TT kernel design is presented and performance metrics are presented for a number of representative embedded platforms, ranging from small 8-bit to more potent 32-bit micro controllers. The resulting system runs on bare metal, completely free of references to external code (even C-lib) which provides a solid basis for further analysis. In comparison to a traditional thread based real-time operating system for embedded applications (FreeRTOS), TT has tighter timing performance and considerably lower code complexity. In conclusion, TinyTimber is a viable alternative for implementing embedded real-time applications in C today.

With the growing complexity of modern embedded real-time systems, scheduling and managing of resources has become a daunting task. While scheduling and resource management for internal events can be simplified by adopting a commonplace real-time operating system (RTOS), scheduling and resource management for external events are left in the hands of the programmer, not to mention managing resources across the boundaries of external and internal events. In this paper we propose a unified system view incorporating earliest deadline first (EDF) for scheduling and stack resource policy (SRP) for resource management. From an embedded real-time system view, EDF+SRP is attractive not only because stack usage can be minimized, but also because the cost of a pre-emption becomes almost as cheap as a regular function call, and the number of preemptions is kept to a minimum. SRP+EDF also lifts the burden of manual resource management from the programmer and incorporates it into the scheduler. Furthermore, we show the efficiency of the SRP+EDF scheme, the intuitiveness of the programming model (in terms of reactive programming), and the simplicity of the implementation.