Accurate RTOS Modeling and Analysis with SystemC

Today, mobile and embedded real-time systems have to cope with the migration and allocation of multiple software tasks running on top of a real-time operating system (RTOS) residing on one or several system processors. Each RTOS has to be configured towards the individual needs of the application and environment. For this, different scheduling strategies and task priorities have to be evaluated in order to keep execution and response times for a given task set. Abstract RTOS simulation is applied to analyze different parameters in early design phases. This chapter presents a SystemC RTOS library for abstract yet accurate RTOS simulation, supporting modeling of preemption in the presence of prioritized and nested interrupts. After introducing basic principles of abstract RTOS simulation, we present our SystemC library in detail. Thereafter, we discuss related approaches and close with applications in electronic automotive systems design and some evaluations.