Follow our illustrated blog on Embedded Software Architecture

How to build a hybrid solar/wind energy harvester?

Responsive software design without threads — Part 1

We need a GUI thread. …is a common developer’s reaction when the application only responds slowly to user clicks. The developer might be right: when some (gui) events require a lot of processing then having more than one thread, e.g. a GUI thread and one or more worker threads, is one of the solutions. The […]

Share

Priority inversion

I found the inspiration for this article while working on a consultancy job: Priority inversion. In computer science, priority inversion is a (potential) problematic scenario in scheduling in which a high priority task is indirectly preempted by a medium priority task effectively inverting the relative priorities of the two tasks. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priority_inversion) To put it more […]

Share

Programs, processes and threads – Part 2

This post is Part 2 of the series. Part1, which explains Programs and Processes, can be found here. Thread A thread is a single path of execution and schedulable by the CPU. It has its own stack, program counter and set of registers. A process (living program and container of all resources — see Part1) has one […]

Share

Programs, processes and threads – Part 1

Introduction Especially process and thread are terms which have many different definitions and implementations. And therefor, it is easy to get confused, and hard to get the concepts crystallized in your mind. Just do some googling and you will find plenty of sources which more or less contradict each other. We will add another source […]

Share

Not all processors have atomic instructions!

Recently we were involved in improving boot-up times of a Linux based platform. We noticed that the boot-up time was much longer than expected based on the processor speed. The only way to figure out what was happening was to profile the start-up procedure. Something that is not always easy on limited embedded platforms like […]

Share