Techniques for software thread integration in real-time embedded systems
Alexander G. Dean, J.P. Shen · 2002
This paper presents details of how to perform thread integration to provide low-cost concurrency for general-purpose microcontrollers and microprocessors. A post-pass compiler interleaves multiple threads of control at the machine instruction level for concurrent execution on a uniprocessor and provides very fine-grain multithreading without context switching overhead. Such efficient concurrency allows implementation of real-time functions in software rather than dedicated peripheral hardware. We investigate a set of code transformations which allow systematic integration of a real-time guest thread into a host thread, producing an integrated thread which meets all real-time requirements. The thread integration concept and the associated code transformations have been applied to example functions chosen from three application domains to evaluate the method's feasibility.