AIMS AND CONTENT

LEARNING OUTCOMES

At the end of the course a student who has followed it with profit will know: - problems related to real-time applications and operating systems; - issues related to design and concurrent programming in real time; - issues related to writing device drivers; - some case studies of commercially available real-time operating systems.

SYLLABUS/CONTENT

Real-time operating systems
- Basic principles;
- Real-time scheduling algorithms for periodic tasks: Rate Monotonic, Earliest Deadline First, Deadline Monotonic;
- Real-time scheduling algorithms for aperiodic tasks: scheduling in background, Polling Server, Deferrable Server;
- Protocols for accessing shared resources: Priority Inheritance, Priority Ceiling.
Soft real-time systems
- Real-time programming in Posix;
- Thread, mutex and conditional variables;
- Rate Monotonic on Posix Linux;
- Periodic servers;
- Interprocess communication for real-time systems.
Linux device drivers.
- System calls
- I/O and interrupt programming
- case study: programming a driver for the parallel port.
Hard real-time systems
- QnX, VxWorks, Windows CE.
- RTAI: periodic and aperiodic tasks; communication mechanisms.

RECOMMENDED READING/BIBLIOGRAPHY

1) Jane W.S. Liu, Real-Time Systems, Prentice Hall, 2000.
2) Giorgio C. Buttazo, Hard Real-time Computing Systems, Kluwer Academic publishers, 1997.
3) Documentation on http://www.qnx.com.

Further readings:
-W.A.Halang, K.M.Sacha, bReal-time Systems, World Scientific 1992
-will be provided by lecturer.

TEACHERS AND EXAM BOARD

Exam Board

ANTONIO SGORBISSA (President)

RENATO UGO RAFFAELE ZACCARIA (President)

FULVIO MASTROGIOVANNI

LESSONS

Class schedule

REAL-TIME OPERATING SYSTEMS

EXAMS

EXAM DESCRIPTION

Written

ASSESSMENT METHODS

The student will be required to pass a written exam, focussing both on issues presented during lectures and during exercises. In particular, the student will be asked to answer some theorical questions, focussing on the design of a real-time application, and some practical questions, focussing on the implementation of a real-time application using the tools presented during the class.

Exam schedule