M. Coutinho, J. Rufino, and C. Almeida (Portugal)
Real-time embedded systems, Event handling, Interrupt rate, Temporal protection, RTEMS.
Embedded real-time applications that interact with the out side environment may be subjected to temporal uncertainty due to the potential asynchronous characteristics of events. If event handling, which is usually associated with inter rupts, is not carefully controlled, overload scenarios can cause application tasks to miss deadlines, with severe con sequences. In this paper we address the problem of control ling event handling timeliness, by enhancing the real-time multitasking kernel RTEMS with components to character ize event rate, decide if there is an overload situation, and switch between an interrupt mode and a polling mode event handling. This is done with minimal impact on the existing application, by replacing the interrupt handler by another one that implements those control mechanisms before call ing the original application interrupt service routine. A case study using the keyboard as the input device is presented, and implementation issues are discussed.
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