Book Image

The Complete Edition - Software Engineering for Real-Time Systems

By : Jim Cooling
Book Image

The Complete Edition - Software Engineering for Real-Time Systems

By: Jim Cooling

Overview of this book

From air traffic control systems to network multimedia systems, real-time systems are everywhere. The correctness of the real-time system depends on the physical instant and the logical results of the computations. This book provides an elaborate introduction to software engineering for real-time systems, including a range of activities and methods required to produce a great real-time system. The book kicks off by describing real-time systems, their applications, and their impact on software design. You will learn the concepts of software and program design, as well as the different types of programming, software errors, and software life cycles, and how a multitasking structure benefits a system design. Moving ahead, you will learn why diagrams and diagramming plays a critical role in the software development process. You will practice documenting code-related work using Unified Modeling Language (UML), and analyze and test source code in both host and target systems to understand why performance is a key design-driver in applications. Next, you will develop a design strategy to overcome critical and fault-tolerant systems, and learn the importance of documentation in system design. By the end of this book, you will have sound knowledge and skills for developing real-time embedded systems.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Preface
15
Glossary of terms

12.6 Operating Systems Aspects

12.6.1 General

The need to use robust, reliable OSs in critical situations will be self-evident to users of personal desktops. Problems encountered in the PC world are many and varied. At the lower end of the frustration, the range is the shutdown of an application accompanied by the message "This program has performed an illegal operation" (baffling when you haven't done anything). Applications may be launched automatically at the most unexpected times, causing havoc with existing work. And, in extreme cases, machines completely lock up, needing to be switched off before operations can resume (a challenging task with a laptop). Well, enraging as this may be, the actual consequences are not especially harmful. However, it should be clear that such behavior is quite unacceptable for mission-critical systems (but not to everybody it seems; one well-known commercial OS was used within the machinery/propulsion systems of the US warship USS...