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research-article

Leveraging real-time and multitasking Ada capabilities to small microcontrollers

Authors:

Mario Aldea Rivas,

Hector Perez TijeroAuthors Info & Claims

Volume 94, Issue C

Pages 32 - 41

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sysarc.2019.02.015

Published: 01 March 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Small embedded microcontrollers typically operate for years without further programmer intervention, so that shipping software free of errors becomes paramount. The Ada programming language includes many safety characteristics (e.g., strong typing or contract-based programming) that help to largely reduce the number of errors introduced by programmers. However, Ada is barely used in microcontrollers with tight memory constraints due to the overhead introduced at run-time. The tasking semantics included in the language represent one major source of this overhead.

In this paper we present a new Ada run-time environment that includes a new scheduling policy based on the one-shot task model that simplifies the implementation of the Ada tasking primitives and allows stack sharing techniques to be applied. Consequently, the proposed approach allows using the inherent safety characteristics of the Ada language along with a set of tasking constructs more suitable for small memory devices. Despite its simplicity, the tasking primitives have an equivalent, if not superior, expressiveness to the typical tasking constructs provided by the operating systems targeted to small microcontrollers.

An implementation based on a small kernel, a modified run-time system and an automatic code transformation tool have been developed in the context of this work. Initial tests provide promising results, showing the tasking constructs are functionally correct and the proposed run-time features a small memory footprint.

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Cited By

Aldea Rivas MPerez Tijero H(2022)M2OS for Arduino UnoACM SIGAda Ada Letters10.1145/3570315.357032241:1(78-82)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3570315.3570322

Index Terms

Leveraging real-time and multitasking Ada capabilities to small microcontrollers
1. Computer systems organization
  1. Embedded and cyber-physical systems
    1. Embedded systems
  2. Real-time systems
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Software system structures
      1. Embedded software
      2. Real-time systems software

Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Journal of Systems Architecture: the EUROMICRO Journal

Journal of Systems Architecture: the EUROMICRO Journal Volume 94, Issue C

Mar 2019

60 pages

ISSN:1383-7621

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Elsevier B.V.

Publisher

Elsevier North-Holland, Inc.

United States

Publication History

Published: 01 March 2019

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Cited By

Aldea Rivas MPerez Tijero H(2022)M2OS for Arduino UnoACM SIGAda Ada Letters10.1145/3570315.357032241:1(78-82)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3570315.3570322

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