Enea Forges Strategic Colaboration with Netlogic Microsytems

Enea and NetLogic Microsystems, a worldwide leader in high-performance intelligent semiconductor solutions for next-generation Internet networks, today announced that they have entered into a strategic collaboration to deliver a comprehensive set of software solutions that will simplify the development of multicore-based communications systems. The agreement spans a number of Enea offerings including its award-winning Enea® OSE Multicore Edition realtime operating system (RTOS) and Enea® Optima. In addition, Enea will build and deliver a Linux development environment based on the Enea Linux Project Framework (ELPF) for the NetLogic Microsystems Linux-based SDK. All Enea offerings will be available across the NetLogic Microsystems' XLP(TM), XLR® and XLS® multi-core, multi-threaded processor families.

"We are excited to collaborate with Enea to optimize their award-winning RTOS and Linux solutions on our industry-leading multicore, multi-threaded processors," said Mark Litvack, senior director of business development, Multi-Core Processor Products at NetLogic Microsystems. "Collaborating with a strong player like Enea to deliver state-of-the-art multicore platforms to the market is central to our strategy of enabling leading OEMs to develop highly competitive and differentiated solutions in the market."

"The communications infrastructure market is demanding best-in-class hardware and software solutions that are able to deliver the performance, scalability and reliability required for advanced video, IPv6 and backhaul services," said Mathias Båth, senior vice president of marketing at Enea. "We are pleased to collaborate with NetLogic Microsystems, a respected industry-leader in multicore processors, to optimize Enea's world-class multicore platform software, support and services on the XLP, XLR and XLS processors."

Enea and NetLogic Microsystems are collaborating to deliver innovative hardware and software solutions to their mutual customers:

Enea will port and enhance the performance of its Enea OSE Multicore Edition RTOS to NetLogic Microsystems' XLS, XLR and XLP families of multi-core, multi-threaded processors. As a preeminent RTOS for NetLogic Microsystems processors, Enea OSE will be delivered with comprehensive board support packages for evaluation boards out of the box, as well as the full Optima Eclipse-based development tools framework, ensuring that mutual customers can rapidly evaluate and develop advanced networking platforms with a fully integrated solution.

Enea will develop a version of its Eclipse-based Linux configuration and build tool known as ELPF, in a pre-integrated NetLogic Microsystems Edition, that incorporates the NetLogic Microsystems Linux-based SDK. This new, combined tool set will be based on a custom configuration of Enea Optima and be delivered to all NetLogic Microsystems customers. It is a freely available platform for a flexible and easily deployable Linux environment.

As an option for customers seeking commercial support from Enea's Linux experts, Enea will provide annual support subscriptions for customers who choose to use the ELPF NetLogic Microsystems Edition development environment including the Linux packages themselves and the tools framework.

The two companies will also jointly explore and evaluate additional collaboration opportunities based on additional Enea software offerings, including advanced networking protocols, database solutions, and device and systems management middleware.

Enea Deepens Strategic Alliance with Freescale

Enea today announced a strategic agreement with Freescale Semiconductor, a global leader in the design and manufacture of embedded semiconductors. Under the agreement Enea and Freescale will deepen their technical collaboration to integrate Enea's operating system family Enea OSE® with Freescale's QorIQ, PowerQUICC and StarCore processors.

Key components of the agreement include collaboration on technology roadmaps, sharing of intellectual property, and joint market and customer development. End-to-end product alignment will be profound and start at the earliest stages of design and carrying through the entire device lifecycle. The result will be broad portfolio coverage, available at or near first silicon as optimally tuned solutions that exploit the aspects of the processor's performance and features accessed through a powerful, easy to use software architecture.

"The depth of this agreement and its importance to the future of the communications industry can not be overstated" said Per Åkerberg, President and CEO of Enea. "Our two companies have always had a strong relationship, but this opens up completely new opportunities with Freescale's current and future customer base. Our goal is to deliver state of art of platforms on which our customers can build the next generation of communications equipment."

"Freescale firmly believes that open, stable and thriving ecosystems are essential to accelerating innovation and preserving customer choice in embedded markets," said Raja Tabet, vice president of Software and Systems for Freescale's Networking and Multimedia Group. "Embedded multicore processors have become extremely advanced, requiring highly optimized software platforms and tools to unlock their full performance and energy efficiency capabilities. We believe the addition of these deep strategic alliances to our well-established ecosystem delivers what our customers need to leverage the full value of our highly sophisticated multicore processors."

Per Åkerberg concludes: "Customers are increasingly looking for pre-integrated processors and operating systems, a trend which is further supported by the latest consolidation in the industry. With this alliance we are taking another significant step forward in meeting that customer need."

RTOS Basics 2: RTOS vs. GPOS

REALTIME OS VS. GENERAL PURPOSE OS

Many non-real-time operating systems also provide similar kernel services. The key difference between general-computing operating systems and real-time operating systems is the need for "deterministic” timing behavior in the real-time operating systems.

 

Formally, "deterministic” timing means that operating system services consume only known and expected amounts of time. In theory, these service times could be expressed as mathematical formulas. These formulas must be strictly algebraic and not include any random timing components. Random elements in service times could cause random delays in application software and could then make the application randomly miss real-time deadlines – a scenario clearly unacceptable for a real-time embedded system.

 

General-computing non-real-time operating systems are often quite non-deterministic. Their services can inject random delays into application software and thus cause slow responsiveness of an application at unexpected times. If you ask the developer of a non-real-time operating system for the algebraic formula describing the timing behavior of one of its services (such as sending a message from task to task), you will invariably not get an algebraic formula. Instead the developer of the non-real-time operating system (such as Windows, UNIX or Linux) will just give you a puzzled look. Deterministic timing behavior was simply not a design goal for these general-computing operating systems. On the other hand, real-time operating systems often go a step beyond basic determinism. For most kernel services, these operating systems offer constant load-independent timing: In other words, the algebraic formula is as simple as: T(message_send)= constant, irrespective of the length of the message to be sent, or other factors such as the numbers of tasks and queues and messages being managed by the RTOS.

 

While general-computing operating systems often offer non-deterministic services in these areas, fully deterministic solutions have been described in this paper.  Timing determinism is of critical importance in real-time embedded applications such as communication systems, mobile baseband radios, airborne computers, medical instruments and automotive systems.

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RTOS Basics: Inside the Kernel

The "kernel” of a real-time operating system ("RTOS”) provides an "abstraction layer” that hides from application software the hardware details of the processor (or set of processors) upon which the application software will run. In doing so, it supplies five main categories of basic services to application software. The most basic category of kernel services is task management. This set of services allows application software developers to design their software as a number of separate "chunks” of software – each handling a distinct topic, a distinct goal, and perhaps its own real-time deadline. Each separate "chunk” of software is called a "task”. Services in this category include the ability to launch tasks and assign priorities to them. The main RTOS service in this category is the scheduling of tasks as the embedded system is in operation. The task scheduler controls the execution of application software tasks, and can make them run in a very timely and responsive fashion.  

The second category of kernel services is intertask communication and synchronization. These services make it possible for tasks to pass information from one to an-other, without danger of that information ever being damaged. They also make it possible for tasks to coordinate, so that they can productively cooperate with one another. Without the help of these RTOS services, tasks might well communicate corrupted information or otherwise interfere with each other. Since many embedded systems have stringent timing requirements, most RTOS kernels also provide some basic timer services, such as task delays and time-outs.

 

Many (but not all) RTOS kernels provide dynamic memory allocation services. This category of services allows tasks to "borrow” chunks of RAM memory for temporary use in application software. Often these chunks of memory are then passed from task to task, as a means of quickly communicating large amounts of data between tasks. Some very small RTOS kernels that are intended for tightly memory-limited environments, do not offer dynamic memory allocation services. Many (but not all) RTOS kernels also provide a "device I/O supervisor” category of services. These services, if available, provide a uniform framework for organizing and accessing the many hardware device drivers that are typical of an embedded system. 

In addition to kernel services, many RTOSs offer a number of optional add-on operating system components for such high-level services as file system organization, network communication, network management, database management, user-inter-face graphics, etc. Although many of these add-on components are much larger and much more complex than the RTOS kernel, they rely on the presence of the RTOS kernel and take advantage of its basic services. Each of these add-on components is included in an embedded system only if its services are needed for implementing the embedded application, in order to keep program memory consumption to a minimum.

 

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Leading Multicore Processing Models: Advantages and Disadvantages

There are fundamentally three multiprocessing models that are used to describe system designs on multicore devices; the SMP, AMP and the bare metal model. These models have a number of benefits and drawbacks, which will be briefly described below

The SMP Model
The Symmetric Multi Processing model is the model used in the design of several enterprise OSs such as Linux as well as in the design of its application domain. In such OSs and their applications data is to a large extent shared, and a number of different locking mechanisms and atomic operations are used frequently for synchronization. 

 

The SMP model is easy to manage from a SW management perspective since it creates a good abstraction where the OS facilitates best-effort cpu load balancing, and it has been used in the server and desktop application domain for a very long time. Enterprise OSs like Linux and Windows provides a best-effort execution platform for these kinds of CPU-intensive applications.The high degree of hardware resource abstraction is in many cases an advantage, but the layer introduces substantial overhead when the application becomes as I/O intensive as they tend to be in embedded packet forwarding/routing applications. The principles of the shared memory programming model on the application level and inside the Linux kernel is based on using mutable shared objects in memory, and this is an inherent bottleneck to scalability in Multicore systems. This will inevitably lead to poor scaling to many cores.This, together with the fact that the complex SMP implementation of kernels in many cases has the drawback of not being deterministic, makes the classic SMP OSs less suitable as a RTOS for high-speed packet processing in the long run.

The AMP Model
The Asymmetric Multi Processing model uses an approach where each core is running its own complete, isolated, operating system or application frame-work (an alternative term for a more light-weight RTOS). This leaves the door open to also choose to have different RTOSs on different cores. The advantage of an AMP system is that high-performance is achieved locally and that it scales well to several cores. Using theAMP model and virtualization technique is also a way to being able to reuse legacy single core designs.The drawback with the AMP model is that the OS provides no support to the distributed application for load balancing or OS resource management.  The configuration, load and startup of such an application is also inherently complex to design.

”Bare Metal” Model
The ”bare metal” model is a single threaded execution model where the available APIs are processor-vendor specific. Since no regular RTOS exist for these threads, a common approach is to run a regular operating system on one or several cores, like Linux, and let the rest of the cores execute a “bare metal” thread and use an application framework that creates an abstraction of the hardware layer. The advantage here is of course that maximal performance and minimal overhead is achieved when running without an RTOS, but the disadvantage is though that the software becomes hardware-specific, which will force a redesign of any applications whenever the hardware is upgraded. Also, the parts of the system running without an RTOS or application framework will take on the role of a black box, i.e. there will be no observability except for the external interfaces.  Any support for tracing, debug or post mortem dump support is not available, and therefore the amount of code “out there” must therefore naturally be kept to a minimum. Over the time though, the need for more functionality in these parts will most likely grow which in turn increases the need for better device abstraction.

Conclusion
Given the advantages and disadvantages of these models - it there a way to approach multicore design that blends the advantages of these methods? 

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Enea OSE Multicore Edition takes Best of Show at ESC

Enea OSE Multicore Edition has been selected as Best of Show at TechInsight's Embedded Systems Conference - Boston.  OSE Multicore Edition features a groundbreaking kernel design that blends the advantages of both traditional Asymmetric Multiprocessing (AMP) and Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP). VDC Research Group served as the jury and awarded the prize, which was based on an exhaustive set of criteria including innovation, business significance, availability and other factors.

 

"Software is the key to releasing the power and value of multicore processors," said Steve Balacco, Director at VDC Research Group. "The unique approach taken by Enea with OSE Multicore Edition delivers the performance of linear scalability with a simple programming model and architecture. Products like this address the challenge to development organizations of being able to make full use of multicore processors within device development."

 

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