A Multi-core RTOS Benchmark Methodology To Assess System Services Under Contentions

Abstract

The adoption of multi-core platforms in embedded systems is growing steadily. Because current RTOSs mainly target dual cores, they tend to encounter performance bottlenecks as the number of cores keeps increasing. However, existing benchmark tools cannot effectively identify these issues. In this paper, we propose a benchmark methodology with multi-core specific factors taken into consideration. We further implement it on an experiment platform based on the TOPPERS/FMP RTOS kernel and 4-core Xilinx ZCU-104 board. The evaluation results show that our benchmark can successfully assess the performance characteristics under different kernel lock designs and various workload scenarios. We also reveal new insights on the possible challenges to implement an efficient multi-core RTOS.