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Quatros: a preemptive multithreaded embedded OS for education

Published: 27 July 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Hands-on experience is crucial to truly understanding the principles of operating systems (OS). This paper describes a preemptive, multithreaded embedded OS assigned as a project in a junior-level OS course. It targets the popular 8051 instruction set architecture (ISA) and can run with as little as 128 bytes of RAM and 1 KB of program memory with preemption and synchronization primitives such as semaphores. It is written in C and assembly and compiled using the open-source Small Device C Compiler (SDCC). It runs on the free EdSim51 simulator, which simulates common peripherals such as LCD, keypads, 7-segment LEDs, ADC, and UART all in high fidelity. This course project has received positive feedback from students who took the course.

References

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Krishna K Agarwal and Achla Agarwal. 2004. Do we need a separate assembly language programming course? Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges 19, 4 (2004), 246--251.
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Arm Limited. 2019. RTX51 Tiny Real-Time Kernel. http://www.keil.com/rtx51tiny/.
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Richard Barry. 2019. The FreeRTOS Kernel: Market-Leading, De-facto Standard and Cross Platform RTOS Kernel. https://www.freertos.org.
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Wayne A Christopher, Steven J Procter, and Thomas E Anderson. 1993. The Nachos Instructional Operating System. In USENIX Winter. 481--488.
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Nannan He and Han-Way Huang. 2014. Use of FreeRTOS in Teaching a Real-Time Embedded Systems Design Course. The ASEE Computers in Education (CoED) Journal 5, 4 (2014), 18.
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Intel. 1994. MCS ® 51 Microcontroller Family User's Manual.
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C. Kao, C. Lee, Y. Yeh, J. Sung, and P. H. Chou. 2019. EcoSim: A Smartphone-Based Sensor-Node Emulator with Native Sensors and Protocol Stack. In 2019 International Symposium on VLSI Design, Automation and Test (VLSI-DAT). 1--4.
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Vinicius Kursancew. 2011. 805x RTOS - a simple free RTOS (scheduler) for the 8051 microcontroller. https://sites.google.com/site/viniciusalexandre/arquivos/805x-rtos-8051.
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James Rogers. 2019. EdSim51 - the 8051 Simulator for Teachers and Students. https://www.edsim51.com/.
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Mike Saunders. 2019. MikeOS - x86 Operating System. http://mikeos.berlios.de.
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Wei-Fang Sun, Shih-Hsien Chan, Zhe-Ting Liu, Yu-Hung Yeh, and Pai H. Chou. 2019. Quatros: A Preemptive Multithreaded Embedded OS for Education. https://epl.tw/quatros/.
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Texas Instruments. 2011. OS Abstraction Layer Application Programming Interface. https://e2e.ti.com/cfs-file/__key/CommunityServer-Discussions-Components-Files/158/0184.OSAL-API.pdf.

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  1. Quatros: a preemptive multithreaded embedded OS for education

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    Published In

    cover image ACM SIGBED Review
    ACM SIGBED Review  Volume 17, Issue 1
    Special Issue on Embedded Operating Systems Workshop 2019 (EWiLi'19)
    February 2020
    58 pages
    EISSN:1551-3688
    DOI:10.1145/3412821
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 27 July 2020
    Published in SIGBED Volume 17, Issue 1

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    Author Tags

    1. C and assembly programming
    2. OS project
    3. embedded OS education
    4. preemptive threads
    5. semaphore

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