Book Image

Embedded Systems Architecture - Second Edition

By : Daniele Lacamera
5 (1)
Book Image

Embedded Systems Architecture - Second Edition

5 (1)
By: Daniele Lacamera

Overview of this book

Embedded Systems Architecture begins with a bird’s-eye view of embedded development and how it differs from the other systems that you may be familiar with. This book will help you get the hang of the internal working of various components in real-world systems. You’ll start by setting up a development environment and then move on to the core system architectural concepts, exploring system designs, boot-up mechanisms, and memory management. As you progress through the topics, you’ll explore the programming interface and device drivers to establish communication via TCP/IP and take measures to increase the security of IoT solutions. Finally, you’ll be introduced to multithreaded operating systems through the development of a scheduler and the use of hardware-assisted trusted execution mechanisms. With the help of this book, you will gain the confidence to work with embedded systems at an architectural level and become familiar with various aspects of embedded software development on microcontrollers—such as memory management, multithreading, and RTOS—an approach oriented to memory isolation.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Part 1 – Introduction to Embedded Systems Development
4
Part 2 – Core System Architecture
8
Part 3 – Device Drivers and Communication Interfaces
13
Part 4 – Multithreading

Task management

An operating system provides the abstraction of parallel running processes and threads by alternating the applications to run in parallel. In fact, on systems with a single CPU, there can only be one running thread at a time. While the running thread executes, all the others are waiting in line until the next task switch.

In a cooperative model, switching the task is always a voluntary action requested by the thread implementation. The opposite approach, known as preemption, requires that the kernel periodically interrupts tasks at any point of their execution, to temporarily save the status and resume the next task in line.

Switching the running task consists of storing the values of the CPU registers in RAM, and loading from memory those of the next task that has been selected for running. This operation is better known as context switching and is the core of the scheduling system.

The task block

Tasks are represented in the system in the form of a task...