EE 599-004: Real-Time and Embedded Computing Systems

Instructor Information

Professor:	Dr. William R. Dieter
Email:	dieter@engr.uky.edu
Office:	683 Anderson Hall
Office Hours:	TBA

Course Information

Textbook:	Jane W. S. Liu, Real-Time Systems, Prentice-Hall, Inc. 2000, ISBN: 0-13-099651-3
Supplementary Reading:	Additional reading material may be assigned during the semester. The additional material will be supplied on the web site or put on reserve in the library.
Course URL:	http://www.engr.uky.edu/~ee599
Syllabus:	http://www.engr.uky.edu/~ee599/syllabus.html
Prerequisites:	Equivalent of two 400 level courses in Electrical Engineering, consent of instructor and engineering standing. EE 380 or equivalent and familiarity with C programming.
Location:	RGAN 202
Time:	MWF 2:00 PM - 2:50 PM

Course Description and Outcomes

From systems as small as a toaster to those as sophisticated as a TiVo or a computer controlling heavy machinery in a factory, computer systems are everywhere. These embedded computer systems often have different constraints on their operation than do their desktop or mainframe counterparts. For example, a word processor on a desktop machine pauses while the user is typing, it is merely annoying. In the case of a heavy machine controller, it could be catastrophic. This class will cover features typically found in real-time and embedded systems with those found in more traditional computer systems. Topics will include scheduling, synchronization, memory management, and architectural features of real-time and embedded systems.

After successfully completing this course, students will be able to:

Choose an appropriate scheduling algorithm and use it to schedule tasks in a real-time operating system.
Use synchronization primitives to synchronize interprocess communications between tasks with different priorities
Understand the basics of interprocessor communication, including mechanisms for real-time communication
Discuss strategies for reducing power consumption

Announcements

Homework

Number	Assigned	Due	Problems	Solutions	Pts
1	1/26/2004	2/2/2004	Homework 1	Solution 1	50
2	2/9/2004	2/18/2004	Homework 2	Solution 2	50
3	3/3/2004	3/12/2004	7.1,7.2,7.4,7.5,7.19		100
4	4/2/2004	4/14/2004	8.3, 8.7, 8.9, 8.15		100

Projects

Number	Assigned	Due	Description	Submission	Pts.
1	1/26/2004	2/16/2004	Project 1	click here to turn in project 1	200
2	3/9/2004	3/26/2004	Project 2	click here to turn in project 2	150
3	4/20/2004	4/28/2004	Project 3	click here to turn in project 3	100

Exams

Midterm Exam, 2/27/2004 RGAN 202, 1 PM
Final Exam, 5/5/2004, RGAN 202, 1 PM
I have written some questions covering material we didn't have homework on, but may be on the exam to help you study that material. If you can answer these questions you should be in good shape.

Supplemental Reading

Filsystem/Storage Links

The Compact Flash Association homepage describes the various compact flash standards and allows downloads of the specification (if you supply your name and address.)
The ext2 and ext3 filesystems are widely used in Linux and typical of Unix filesystems. Ext2 is described in a paper that appeared in the Proceedings of the First Dutch International Symposium on Linux. Linux Planet has a good introduction to ext3. A transcript of a talk by Seven Tweedie, one of the key developers of ext3, describes ext3 in more detail.
Xavier Leclercq has written a very detailed description of the FAT12/FAT16/FAT32/VFAT filesystem, with detail down to where bits should appear on the disk. Andries Brouwer has also written a good description of the FAT filesystems.
JFFS2 development is currently lead by RedHat. Their site has a good paper by David Woodhouse describing JFFS2

Real-Time Scheduling for Low-Power Systems

Padmanabhan Pillai and Kang G. Shin, Real-/Time Dynamic Voltage Scaling for Low-Power Embedded Operating Systems, in The Proceedings of the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, Oct. 2001.
Ajay Dudani, Frank Mueller, and Yfan Zhu, Energy-Conserving Feedback EDF Scheduling for Embedded Systems with Real-Time Constraints, in The Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems, 2002.
Y. Zhu and F. Mueller, Feedback EDF Scheduling Exploiting Dynamic Voltage Scaling, in Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium, May 2004.

File Management on Mars: Sprirt, one of the two rovers currently exploring Mars, recently ran into some software problems. This article in EE Times describes the file management bug that caused the problem, and how it was fixed.
Software Matters for Power Consumption: Embedded software can play a significant role in power consumption of embedded systems. This article discusses four ways to design software to avoid power consumption.
What Really Happend on Mars?: In 1997 NASA used the Mars Rover to explore and perform tests on the planet Mars. Though the mission was mostly trouble free, Mike Jones wrote about a priority inversion problem that occured during the mission. Subsequently, the person leading the software team wrote a more detailed description that fixed a few problems with the original description. These articles show how priority inversion can come about in real systems, as well as how the problem was found and fixed.

Useful Links

Syllabus: The course syllabus is available online.
Mutex and Condition Variable Example: fifo-mutex-example.c shows an example of how to use mutexes and condiiton variables.
RTLinux Documentation: FSM Labs maintains the RTLinux source code which is freely available (meaning you can download and install it on your PC at home). The FSM labs web site has a number of white papers discussing the design of RTLinux and reference material and tutorials on how to use RTLinux. Manual pages for RTLinux are a good reference once you have an idea what it going on.
RTLinux Examples: Here are A PDF of intro to rtlinux lecture, the (non-real-time)hello.c module, and the rthello.c module.
GCC Inline Assembly: We will not do much assembly language programming in this class, if any, but assembly programming is common in embedded and real-time systems. Often it is sufficient to write just a few instructions in assembly. GCC's inline assembly feature makes mixing assembly and C code easy. This introduction to GCC inline assembler was written for DJGPP, the DOS based version of GCC, but applies to all versions of GCC (the examples are all x86 assembly, though).