What is VxWorks 5.x?
VxWorks 5.x
In this section, we describe VxWorks, a popular real-time operating system providing hard real-time support. VxWorks, commercially developed by Wind River Systems, is widely used in automobiles, consumer and industrial devices, and networking equipment such as switches and routers. VxWorks is also used to control the two rovers—Spirit and Opportunity—that began exploring the planet Mars in 2004. The organization of VxWorks is shown in Figure 19.12.
VxWorks is centered around the Wind microkernel. Recall from our discussion in Section 2.7.3 that microkernels are designed so that the operating-system kernel provides a bare minimum of features; additional utilities, such as networking, file systems, and graphics, are provided in libraries outside of the kernel. This approach offers many benefits, including minimizing the size of the kernel—a desirable feature for an embedded system requiring a small footprint.
The Wind microkernel supports the following basic features:
• Processes. The Wind microkernel provides support for individual processes and threads (using the Pthread API). However, similar to Linux, VxWorks does not distinguish between processes and threads, instead referring to both as tasks.
REAL-TIME LINUX
The Linux operating system is being used increasingly in real-time environments. We have already covered its soft real-time scheduling features (Section 5.6.3), whereby real-time tasks are assigned the highest priority in the system,. Additional features in the 2.6 release of the kernel make Linux increasingly suitable for embedded systems. These features include a fully preemptive kernel and a more efficient scheduling algorithm, which runs in 0(1) time regardless of the number of tasks active in the system. The 2.6 release also makes it easier to port Linux to different hardware architectures by dividing the kernel into modular components.
Another strategy for integrating Linux into real-time environments involves combining the Linux operating system with a small real-time kernel, thereby providing a system that acts as both a general-purpose and a real-time system. This is the approach taken by the RTLinux operating system. In RTLinux, the standard Linux kernel runs as a task in a small real-time operating system. The real-time kernel handles all interrupts— directing each interrupt to a handler in the standard kernel or to an interrupt handler in the real-time kernel.
Furthermore, RTLinux prevents the standard Linux kernel from ever disabling interrupts, thus ensuring that it cannot add latency to the real-time system. RTLinux also provides different scheduling policies, including rate-monotonic scheduling (Section 19.5.1) and earliest-deadline-first scheduling (Section 19.5.2).
• Scheduling. Wind provides two separate scheduling models: preemptive and nonpreemptive round-robin scheduling with 256 different priority levels. The scheduler also supports the POSIX API for real-time threads covered in Section 19.5.4.
• Interrupts. The Wind microkernel also manages interrupts. To support hard real-time requirements, interrupt and dispatch latency times are bounded.
• Interprocess communication. The Wind microkernel provides both shared memory and message passing as mechanisms for communication between separate tasks. Wind also allows tasks to communicate using a technique known as pipes—a mechanism that behaves in the same way as a FIFO queue but allows tasks to communicate by writing to a special file, the pipe.
To protect data shared by separate tasks, VxWorks provides semaphores and mutex locks with a priority inheritance protocol to prevent priority inversion. Outside the microkernel, VxWorks includes several component libraries that provide support for POSrx, Java, TCP/IP networking, and the like. All components are optional, allowing the designer of an embedded system to customize the system according to its specific needs.
For example, if networking is not required, the TCP/IP library can be excluded from the image of the operating system. Such a strategy allows the operating-system designer to 712 Chapter 19 Real-Time Systems include only required features, thereby minimizing the size—or footprint—of the operating system. VxWorks takes an interesting approach to memory management, supporting two levels of virtual memory. The first level, which is quite simple, allows control of the cache on a per-page basis. This policy enables an application to specify certain pages as non-cacheable.
When data are being shared by separate tasks running on a multiprocessor architecture, it is possible that shared data can reside in separate caches local to individual processors. Unless an architecture supports a cache-coherency policy to ensure that the same data residing in two caches will not be different, such shared data should not be cached and should instead reside only in main memory so that all tasks maintain a consistent view of the data.
The second level of virtual memory requires the optional virtual memory component VxVMI (Figure 19.12), along with processor support for a memory management unit (MMU). By loading this optional component on systems with an MMU, VxWorks allows a task to mark certain data areas as private. A data area marked as private may only be accessed by the task it belongs to. Furthermore, VxWorks allows pages containing kernel code along with the interrupt vector to be declared as read-only. This is useful, as VxWorks does not distinguish between user and kernel modes; all applications run in kernel mode, giving an application access to the entire address space of the system.
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