Hardware/software partitioning of operating systems: focus on deadlock detection and avoidance

As multiprocessor system-on-a-chip (MPSoC) designs become more common, hardware/software codesign engineers face new challenges involving operating system integration. To speed up operating system/MPSoC codesign, the paper presents recent research in hardware/software partitioning of a real-time operating system (RTOS). After a brief overview of the δ hardware/software RTOS design framework, the authors focus on new results in deadlock detection and avoidance. Among various configured RTOS/MPSoC designs in this research, they show an example where a system with the deadlock detection hardware unit (DDU) achieves a 46% speed-up of application execution time over a system with deadlock detection in software. Similarly, they show another example where a system with the deadlock avoidance hardware unit (DAU) not only automatically avoids deadlock but also achieves a 44% speed-up of application execution time over a system avoiding deadlock in software; furthermore, in our example, the DAU only consumes 0.005% of the MPSoC total chip area.