Soft timers: efficient microsecond software timer support for network processing
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
A Firm Real-Time System Implementation using Commercial Off-the-Shelf Hardware and Free Software
RTAS '98 Proceedings of the Fourth IEEE Real-Time Technology and Applications Symposium
Supporting time-sensitive applications on a commodity OS
ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review - OSDI '02: Proceedings of the 5th symposium on Operating systems design and implementation
Hardware support for real-time operating systems
Proceedings of the 1st IEEE/ACM/IFIP international conference on Hardware/software codesign and system synthesis
30 seconds is not enough!: a study of operating system timer usage
Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGOPS/EuroSys European Conference on Computer Systems 2008
A real-time programmer's tour of general-purpose L4 microkernels
EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems - Operating System Support for Embedded Real-Time Applications
One-Shot Time Management Analysis in EPOS
SCCC '08 Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference of the Chilean Computer Science Society
On the Design of Flexible Real-Time Schedulers for Embedded Systems
CSE '09 Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering - Volume 02
Hi-index | 0.00 |
Common sense dictates that single-shot timer mechanisms are more suitable for real-time applications than periodic ones, specially in what concerns precision and jitter. Nevertheless, real-time embedded systems are inherently periodic, with tasks whose periods are almost always known at design-time. Therefore a carefully designed periodic timer should be able to incorporate much of the advantages of single-shot timers and yet avoid hardware timers reprogramming, an expensive operation for the limited-resource platforms of typical embedded systems. In this paper, we describe and evaluate two timing mechanisms for embedded systems, one periodic and another single-shot, aiming at comparing them and identifying their strengths and weaknesses. Our experiments have shown that a properly designed periodic timer can usually match, and in some cases even outperform, the single-shot counterpart in terms of precision and interference, thus reestablishing periodic timers as a dependable alternative for real-time embedded systems.