Real-time Linux on RISC-V
From iis-projects
Contents
Overview
Status: Available
- Type: Semester Thesis/Master Thesis
- Professor: Prof. Dr. L. Benini
- Supervisors:
Introduction
Real-time systems are systems that need to guarantee certain time constraints such as for example responding within a certain time frame. This means that computations not only need to be logically correct but also the physical instant of the result computation has to meet a particular timing constraint.
Regular general-purpose operating systems such as Linux are often not designed to ensure that real-time constraints are respected.
To address that problem several so called real-time operating systems have been developed in the last decades and used in several fields where the design of safety-critical systems matters (automotive and aerospace above all). Among these, Zephyr OS [1] is a promising scalable real-time operating system with small memory footprint designed for resource-constrained systems following modern security practices. It supports a lot of architectures such as ARM (Cortex series), MIPS, SPARC, AMD64, and RISC-V. The development model is very similar to the linux kernel: The kernel sources, drivers and any bootstrapping code are part of the same project giving a nice out-of-the-box experience.
ControlPULP is an open-source HW/SW platform based on PULP [2], a parallel embedded MCU implementing the RISC-V ISA. ControlPULP has been developed to serve as an integrated power controller for HPC processors [3]. In this scenario, a timely response from multiple MIMO interfaces is required to be able to track and set the operating point of the controlled system in a workload-aware manner.
Currently, we already support FreeRTOS [6] in ControlPULP as real-time operating system
Project
The goal of this project is to port Zephyr OS to ControlPULP:
- a
- b
- c
Character
- 15% Literature / architecture review
- 65% Software layer
- 20% Evaluation
Prerequisites
- Experience with digital design in SystemVerilog as taught in VLSI I
- Basic knowledge of operating systems
- Knowledge of C programming language and UNIX tooling as from previous bachelor/master courses
