TECS Components Providing Functionalities of OSEK Specifications for ITRON OS

Abstract

The number of electronic control units (ECUs) has increased to manage complicated vehicle systems. Many kinds of operating systems that run on ECUs exist: ITRON OS, OSEK OS, and so forth. Currently, developers implement the system control software according to the ITRON and OSEK specifications independently. For example, even though OSes provide similar functionalities, OSEK specifications have several differences from ITRON specifications such as scheduling policies (Non-preemptive scheduling), alarms, hook routines, and several system calls. Thus, when using legacy software following OSEK specifications on the ITRON OS, developers have to port the software to ITRON OS. This paper presents a component-based framework to fill the gap between OSEK and ITRON specifications by using TECS (TOPPERS Embedded Component System). The work required to port legacy OSEK applications built with TECS components to ITRON applications built for TECS is reduced by using our method. TECS is a high-level abstraction component system for enhancing the reusability of software. Examples for the characteristics of the framework are: (1) Non-preemptive scheduling tasks are implemented by changing the priority of the task to the highest priority; (2) The system works as the OSEK alarm based on a counter value, which is incremented at an arbitrary time interval; (3) OSEK hook routines are also available with a particular timing. Experimental results demonstrate that the overhead of the corresponding system calls compared to the original OSEK system calls is reduced to within 13.58µsec.