Adapting FreeRTOS for multicores: an experience report

Mistry, James; Naylor, Matthew; Woodcock, Jim

doi:10.1002/spe.2188

Cited by 11 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Task switch is also supported transparently because the pthread library is responsible for saving and restoring the context. In most MCU OSs, at a particular time, only one thread can be executed due to the immature multi-core support [41], [48]. As a result, we need to ensure that a thread exclusively occupies the current process.…”

Section: Portable Mcumentioning

confidence: 99%

From Library Portability to Para-rehosting: Natively Executing Microcontroller Software on Commodity Hardware

Li¹,

Guan

Lin

et al. 2021

Proceedings 2021 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium

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Finding bugs in microcontroller (MCU) firmware is challenging, even for device manufacturers who own the source code. The MCU runs different instruction sets than x86 and exposes a very different development environment. This invalidates many existing sophisticated software testing tools on x86. To maintain a unified developing and testing environment, a straightforward way is to re-compile the source code into the native executable for a commodity machine (called rehosting). However, ad-hoc re-hosting is a daunting and tedious task and subject to many issues (library-dependence, kernel-dependence and hardware-dependence). In this work, we systematically explore the portability problem of MCU software and propose pararehosting to ease the porting process. Specifically, we abstract and implement a portable MCU (PMCU) using the POSIX interface. It models common functions of the MCU cores. For peripheral specific logic, we propose HAL-based peripheral function replacement, in which high-level hardware functions are replaced with an equivalent backend driver on the host. These backend drivers are invoked by well-designed para-APIs and can be reused across many MCU OSs. We categorize common HAL functions into four types and implement templates for quick backend development. Using the proposed approach, we have successfully rehosted nine MCU OSs including the widely deployed Amazon FreeRTOS, ARM Mbed OS, Zephyr and LiteOS. To demonstrate the superiority of our approach in terms of security testing, we used off-the-shelf dynamic analysis tools (AFL and ASAN) against the rehosted programs and discovered 28 previously-unknown bugs, among which 5 were confirmed by CVE and the other 19 were confirmed by vendors at the time of writing.

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Section: Portable Mcumentioning

confidence: 99%

From Library Portability to Para-rehosting: Natively Executing Microcontroller Software on Commodity Hardware

Li¹,

Guan

Lin

et al. 2021

Proceedings 2021 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium

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“…Such kernel receives over 75,000 downloads per year [26]. By using FreeRTOS, it becomes possible to organize applications http://journals.uob.edu.bh as a collection of independent threads (or tasks) of execution.…”

Section: Freertos Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Real-Time Operating System FreeRTOS Application for Fire Alarm Project in Reduced Scale

Turci¹

2017

IJCDS

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Uncontrolled fires are responsible for many harmful damages and human losses. Hence, the design of a system in order to reduce such problems may be considered relevant. The use of real-time operating systems can present a possibility to achieve significant results and improvements in fire alarm projects, considering that fires are examples of critical time systems in which the time of response is extremely important. In the proposed project, an algorithm was developed by using Arduino Nano and FreeRTOS open source kernel in order to accomplish such task in a reduced scale project. Some tests, such as jitter, latency, and worst case response time are also carried out to evaluate the performance of the real-time system proposed in the present project.

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“…Representative open‐source embedded real‐time operating systems for multiprocessor architectures include the Real‐Time Executive for Multiprocessor Systems (RTEMS) , FreeRTOS and the Embedded Parallel Operating System (EPOS) . However, only the former also considers the execution of applications with different levels of criticality, as it was ported to the monoprocessor version of XtratuM .…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multiprocessor platform for partitioned real-time systems

Tijero

Rivas

Ortega

2016

Softw. Pract. Exper.

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Two current trends in the real-time and embedded systems are the multiprocessor architectures and the partitioning technology that enables several isolated applications with different criticality levels to share the same computer. This paper presents a real-time platform for multiprocessor and partitioned systems, in which communication requirements are also considered. The paper describes the adaptation of MaRTE OS (a monoprocessor real-time operating system) to the XtratuM hypervisor for the multiprocessor Intel x86 architecture. This adaptation makes two contributions to ease the development process of future mixed-criticality applications: firstly, it integrates the hypervisor technology and the fully partitioned scheduling in a multiprocessor environment, and secondly, it provides the basis to interconnect partitioned and non-partitioned applications via a homogeneous communication subsystem.• Clock and timer management. Because clocks and timers are shared by all the partitions, MaRTE OS must access these services through the appropriate hypercalls. Although XtratuM provides support for two different clocks (a global monotonic clock and a local execution time clock for each virtual CPU), this first adaptation only uses the global clock and leaves the integration of the remaining clock for future work. INTERPARTITION COMMUNICATION EVALUATIONThis section aims at validating the proposed interpartition communication subsystem. To better evaluate its performance, a set of tests has been executed without using other high-level network protocols such as UDP/IP on top of our approach.The tests will measure the communication latency associated with a data flow between two partitions (i.e. the first partition writes data samples and the second partition reads them). The communication latency is defined as the time between the transmission and the reception of each data sample. This performance analysis includes two case-studies, which are detailed in the following: Overhead testThe first case-study aims at measuring the overhead of using the proposed interpartition communication subsystem on top of the hypervisor. To this end, the test defines one single data flow from partition 1 to partition 2 and with one disjoint core allocated to each partition. The test is executed with different payloads and two configurations: (1) by directly using the communication services provided by XtratuM and (2) through the interpartition communication subsystem implemented in MaRTE OS.The maximum latencies obtained for the Overhead test are reported in Figure 12. As can be observed, the interpartition communication subsystem adds an overhead lower than 15 ms to the communication services provided by XtratuM. This overhead can be explained by the software layer added to use the interpartition communication subsystem as a standard driver in MaRTE OS and the extra overhead in the handling of interrupts by the operating system. Finally, it is worth noting that maximum latencies are nearly constant for the selected payloads in both cases, ...

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Adapting FreeRTOS for multicores: an experience report

Cited by 11 publications

References 8 publications

From Library Portability to Para-rehosting: Natively Executing Microcontroller Software on Commodity Hardware

From Library Portability to Para-rehosting: Natively Executing Microcontroller Software on Commodity Hardware

Real-Time Operating System FreeRTOS Application for Fire Alarm Project in Reduced Scale

Multiprocessor platform for partitioned real-time systems

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