Embedded in Cork

As part of my work with Motorola I had the opportunity to be part of a team that ported an RTOS (Real Time Operating System). The original RTOS ran on a Motorola/Freescale 68K (68000) series of processors and we moved it to a PowerPC based communications processor.

During the summer of 2007 I was able to co-present a paper about the work we did at the Embedded Systems and Applications conference of Worldcomp ‘07. The title of the paper is “PowerPC Kernel Implementation for GSM Radio Platform” and as it was published and presented in a public forum it gives me the liberty to openly discuss the contents of the paper on this blog.

My hope is that this will be the first of a series of posts that delves into the key areas involved in implementing a PowerPC kernel. The kernel is at the heart of the RTOS, managing context switching, memory, stack switching, interrupts and system calls. I hope to touch on all of those areas, with a focus on the optimisations introduced to minimise the impact of running with a fully enabled memory management unit and unique user/supervisor/interrupt stacks.