Resource management for embedded systems

Classical strategies for resource management in operating systems are often complex and innapropriate for embedded systems. Implementations for these strategies may use either virtual function tables or long conditional structures to provide transparent access to different resources. This overhead is unacceptable for embedded systems. The EPOS operating system provides flexible and transparent access to resources for applications without incurring in unnecessary overhead. Metaprogrammed structures are used to predict, according to application usage and in compile time, whether a resource must use a polymorphic representation or may be accessed through direct calls. This way, virtual function tables are only used in the system when strictly necessary, and thus saving resources. In this article, we show that this strategy is a viable alternative for resource management in embedded systems.