CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxmultithreadingbootloaderfirmware
Tomas Kubes
Tomas Kubes

Reputation: 25158

It is possible to combine Linux (one core) and bare-bone firmware (second core) on one dual core computer?

I was checking project Embedded ECG data acquisition system from instructables and there is mension a TODO: 

Combining the OS and bare-bone firmware 

UNDER CONSTRUCTION
** Since the bootloader only loads one firmware to the Core,
I need to modify the ELF file, to have Linux and bare-bone Core at the same time **

It seems to me as interresting approach how to make full featured Linux and critical realtime OS on one board (for example Raspberry PI). It is really possible? I have heard, that Linux can be setup to not use some cores. But I suppose that Linux use virtual memory and bare-bone firmware does usually not. Can the memory be shared between these OS. What about interruptions? Can these two OS handle interruptions separately? Can boot loader load these two systems to both core at once? I can imagine that one thread in boot loader will skip to address of bare-bone OS. It is correct approach?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 1597

Answers (2)

Claudio
Claudio

Reputation: 10947

Yes, it is possible, even if the full setup is not straightforward. A couple of examples:

Those examples are based on system partitioning by hard-coding the assignment of the different cores to different OSs.

If your system is capable of hardware-assisted virtualization, you can use an hypervisor for making (and enforcing) such partitioning. You can for example use Siemen's Jailhouse, KVM or Xen.

Upvotes: 2

viraptor
viraptor

Reputation: 34185

Kind of. This is what people already do to some extent with network stack / driver. For example IsoStack idea works in a similar way. There's a project which actually implements this on linux by dedicating cores to network cards, but my google-fu is failing me.

Upvotes: 1

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