Fast-Startup Concept for Embedded Systems

By Andreas Knirsc

Abstract:

Embedded systems becoming more and more part of our everyday life as they are used within all kinds of devices used for transportation, communication and entertainment, as well as getting a integrated part of industrial and military solutions. The need for more sophisticated solutions and the availability of increased computational power has affect on the pristine single purpose systems. Current implementations have to aid their users for a wide variety of orthogonal use-cases. To cope with the resulting increased complexity, advanced software development techniques and adequate ressource management during runtime was introduced to the embedded sector. Today an embedded application developer will not take much notice of the peculiarities of a certain target platform due to the reliance on several layers of abstraction provided by frameworks, toolkits and standardized system libraries. The distance between hardware and application enables a more efficient development process resulting in a reduced time-to-market, but unfortunately affects the time needed for starting up. The user has to face the consequences by a reduced usability, being not able to having the device usable on-demand and instantly.

Within this thesis it is tried to find solutions for decreasing the startup latency of embedded software systems, while maintaining a flexible software stack to support the implementation of various use-cases. Therefore the characteristics of such systems are reviewed as well as dierent suitable approaches for optimizing the necessary steps for reaching an operable system. Those will be illustrated by use of a prototypal application, utilizing the recently emerged Intel Atom hardware architecture. This includes the identication of appropriate methods of measurement, followed by an evaluation of achieved results.

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