It just dawned on me recently (and it sure must have been obvious to those working with configuring AMP — Assymtric Multiprocessing Systems) that in an AMP setup, the operating systems involved actually know about each other and have to account for the fact that they are sharing a single processor chip with other operating systems. So you cannot just take two single-core operating system images from an existing multiple-processor (local memory) solution and put them on a single chip and things just work. You do need to prepare the boot process and find a way to nicely share the common I/O devices, timers, accelerator engines and other resources on the chip. This is materially different from a virtualized setup.
Category: embedded software
SICS Multicore Day August 31
The SICS Multicore Day August 31 was a really great event! We had some fantastic speakers presenting the latest industry research view on multicores and how to program them. Marc Tremblay did the first presentation in Europe of Sun’s upcoming Rock processor. Tim Mattson from Intel tried hard to provoke the crowd, and Vijay Saraswat of IBM presented their X10 language. Erik Hagersten from Uppsala University provided a short scene-setting talk about how multicore is becoming the norm.
Real-Time in Sweden (RTiS) 2007
RTiS 2007 just took place in Västerås, Sweden. It is a biannual event where Swedish real-time research (and that really means embedded in general these days) presents new results and summarizes results from the past two years. For someone who has worked in the field for ten years, it really feels like a gathering of friends and old acquaintances. And always some fresh new faces. Due to a scheduling conflict, I was only able to make it to day one of two.
I presented a short summary of a paper I and a colleague at Virtutech wrote last year together with Ericsson and TietoEnator, on the Simics-based simulator for the Ericsson CPP system (see the publications page for 2006 and soon for 2007). I also presented the Simics tool and demoed it in the demo session. Overall, nice to be talking to the mixed academic-industrial audience.