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

5. Multitasking Systems – an Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to describe the basics of multitasking systems by setting out to describe:

  • What the tasking model of software is
  • The benefits of modeling software as a set of collaborating tasks – a multitasking structure
  • How interrupts can be used as a mechanism for implementing concurrency
  • What, in general terms, a real-time operating system (RTOS) is and what it does
  • How an RTOS can be used as a mechanism for implementing concurrency
  • How task execution is controlled – scheduling principles
  • Problems that may be met when tasks share resources, and showing how these can be resolved
  • Features needed to enable tasks to communicate with each other – inter-task communication