Efficiently migrating real-time systems to multi-cores

Power consumption and thermal problems limit a further increase of speed in single-core processors. Multi-core architectures have therefore received significant interest. However, a shift to multi-core processors is a big challenge for developers of embedded real-time systems, especially considering existing ¿legacy¿ systems which have been developed with uniprocessor assumptions. These systems have been developed and maintained by many developers over many years, and cannot easily be replaced due to the huge development investments they represent. An important issue while migrating to multi-cores is how to distribute tasks among cores to increase performance offered by the multi-core platform. In this paper we propose a partitioning algorithm to efficiently distribute legacy system tasks along with newly developed ones onto different cores. The target of the partitioning is increasing system performance while ensuring correctness.