The New PsychOS Century

PsychOS has now reached the 100-revision mark! And what a revision it is - with this commit, we now have interrupt-based terminal I/O essentially working. This still has a few unresolved bugs; for instance, we don't handle the case where the server task I/O buffer overflows. Nevertheless, this brings us a lot closer than before to completing the kernel portion of Real-Time. Keep posted!

For Whom The Clock Ticks

Another week, another feature: we now have hardware interrupts working! Software interrupts are comparatively easier to handle, as the user task can decide when they occur; by contrast, a hardware interrupt can strike anytime, so your context switch needs to be prepared.

To soften the blow, we used the Vectored Interrupt Controllers (VIC) within the TS-7200 system-on-chip. These function as interrupt service routine jump tables with the added benefit of a built-in priority mechanism; proper initialization permitting, they will automatically turn off all interrupts at higher priority. Handy indeed.

It's futile to handle hardware interrupts unless you actually do something with them, so we've also put together the ClockServer(). This special user task receives notification of timer interrupts from ClockNotifier(), which in turn waits upon those interrupts using the new AwaitEvent() system call. When a task calls AwaitEvent(), the kernel keeps track of which event the caller is waiting on. Upon a hardware interrupt, the ARM jumps to our KernelEnter() in IRQ mode, does all of that wonderful context-switching-related stuff, then looks up the current interrupt in the VIC. The VIC provides the address of a handler function; for instance, interrupts from Timer 3 are handled by TimerHandler(). These handlers take care of waking up the appropriate tasks by reinserting them onto the priority queues.

Of course, we've omitted a few details; you can always poke around our source code to fill in the blanks.

Orangutans: He can talk! He can talk!

Another step closer to a working kernel called PsychOS; our little baby tasks can talk now.. :) We have successfully implemented the Send/Receive/Reply message passing primitives that give our user tasks ability to communicate with each other. This simple, yet robust, technique is used in many real-world operating systems, such as QNX.

In fact, for those who don't know, QNX is a commercially successful real-time OS, which is based on a project from CS 452 (the course we're taking). The two fellas, who took the course, are now millionaires and QNX is used in things, such as your car, medical equipment, communication devices and many more.. We hope to follow in their footsteps...

There is a new component in PsychOS, which makes use of the Send/Receive/Reply, namely the name server. The name server, as the name suggests, manages mapping of task IDs to their registered names. So if Task A wants to talk to Task B, it asks the name server what B's task ID is and can start sending messages to it. Cool, eh?

We also managed to hack together a witty Makefile that automatically takes care of all the dependencies and includes any new source files in the build process. It is very reusable and worth looking at if you are sick of adding make targets for each new file.

Next on TODO list: Interrupts

Stay tuned for more updates! :)

Task #4, I Choose You!

After another code/blackboard sprint this morning, we're proud to announce a working implementation of basic scheduling along with a few simple system calls. (Like fork() - I hear that one's pretty important.)

We use FIFO scheduling with a preset number of queues, each representing a given priority level; the kernel picks the ready task at the highest priority, runs it, then places it at the back of the queue at its priority level. Since low priority tasks can easily be starved by high priority tasks, this may seem like an embarrassingly stupid scheduling algorithm - until you realize that this is embedded real-time programming, where we alone decide exactly which tasks run at each priority level.

For your amusement, here are some development statistics so far.

ARM assembly: 50 lines, 25 hours
C: 250 lines, 5 hours

There's a point about language expressiveness, ease of debugging, and programmer productivity here that I'm going to completely ignore in favour of getting some much-needed sleep. We'll try to get some terminal output screenshots up in the next few days.

Context switching works!

Welcome to the PsychOS blog! We'll be keeping a diary of our successes and failures throughout the length of the real-time programming course. If you want to know more about the course, the architecture we are using, or you are just wondering what PsychOS means, look at our wiki page.

Before we could do anything, we had to spend countless hours digging through the ARM reference manual and the circuit board user guide. We started working on the kernel from scratch this week and today we finally managed to get the first step done - the context switching...

Since Monday, we wasted over 20 hours getting the context switching working properly because of a stupid bug. The user task completed a system call successfully once, but failed horribly the second time. Evan eventually figured out that the processor mode wasn't properly restored upon exiting the kernel from a system call... High five! :) All we have left to do is to implement a few other system calls besides Pass() and the first kernel assignment will be done!