Multicore Scheduling Issues in Ericsson Mobile Platforms

The multicore revolution is now happening both on the desktop and the server systems and is expected to soon enter the embedded space. For the last decades hardware manufacturers have been able to deliver more powerful CPUs by higher clock speed and advanced memory systems. However, the frequency is no longer increasing, and instead the number of cores on each CPU is. Software development for embedded uniprocessor systems is completely dominated by imperative style programming and deeply rooted in C and scheduling of threads and processes. We believe that the multicore challenge requires new methodologies and new tools to make efficient use the hardware. Data flow programming, which has received considerable attention over the years, is a promising candidate for design and implementation of certain classes of applications, such as complex media coding, network processing, imaging and digital signal processing, and embedded control, on parallel hardware. This talk discusses current problems areas within the embedded domain and presents the Open Dataflow framework. Traditionally, very little work has been done on real-time analysis and design of dataflow systems. The difficulties involved, which relates to the high level of dynamicity are discussed and some research ideas are presented.