Design And Implementation Of A Board Support Package In Embedded Multi-core Environment

The rapid development of the consumer electronics industry and the manufacturing industry increase the demand of embedded systems for performance, scalability, security, system utilization and other aspects. For increasingly complex embedded systems, a series of new technologies which are born for the key indicators of performance, power consumption, system utilization, security and so on in traditional desktops and servers environment. Although these technologies have become fully developed in traditional desktops and servers, yet these technologies still need to be modified and optimized for embedded systems. Due to the characteristics of embedded systems and the slow development of software and operating systems in embedded systems, how to effectively use multi-processor computing, how to ensure the correctness and the security of multi-processor embedded systems and how to coordinate the cooperation between systems in a complex heterogeneous environment become critical to how to improve the overall performance of embedded systems with hardware costs remaining unchanged.To solve issues above, this thesis uses Texas Instruments’ latest high-performance KeyStone multi-core digital signal processor platform and discusses the multi-core and heterogeneous multiple operating system architecture technology on the basis of analysis in the technologies supported by KeyStone architecture. It also discusses the design and implementation of a multi-core embedded system framework which supports both asymmetric multiprocessing and symmetric multiprocessing architecture. Finally it gives a method to provide system-level support for running more than one operating system simultaneously and supports embedded applications in homogeneous or heterogeneous multi-core environment by applying two traditional embedded operating systems to the platform called Scorpius. The core work of the thesis can be generalized as following:1. This thesis firstly discusses the most recent multi-core processors used in embedded systems. Then it gives a simple introduction to some embedded multi-core operating systems. Finally it examines and analyzes the implementation details of multi-processor technology in KeyStone architecture and other CPU architectures and gives a comprehensive analysis of TMS320C6678 which is a member of the KeyStone.2. This thesis also designs an embedded system platform Scorpius which supports running more than one operating system simultaneously on cores which can be grouped in asymmetric multiprocessing mode or symmetric multiprocessing mode. The core work includes implementations of hardware drivers for TMS320C6678, basic components which are necessary for multi-core runtime and operating system supporting components for operating system which runs on the Scorpius platform.3. The Scorpius platform in the thesis designed the “Multi-core Supporting Layer”, which separates the basic platform and the multi-core operating systems which run on it. The thesis also transplanted two traditional embedded operating systems on it.