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by jason mcdonald, senior editor | read other blog posts

Embedded multicore has been a technology trend for some time now, as has the embrace of multicore by the RTOS (Real-time Operating System) vendors. As the recent Embedded Systems Conference showed, however, now is the take-off time for embedded multicore tool support, and many of the RTOS vendors are leading the way. Let's take a look!

contents of this post:

1. RTOS Support for Embedded Multicore
2. Embedded Multicore Tools Support
3. RTOS and Embedded Support for Multicore - Top Learning Sites
4. feedback - read it
5. feedback - give it

RTOS Support for Embedded Multicore

Most of the major RTOS companies, if not all, now support embedded multicore systems in various states. Wind River, for example, long ago jumped on the multicore bandwagon, and has one of the best online 'learning' multicore microsites where you can learn not just about multicore but (of course) about the Wind River multicore solutions. It's at http://www.windriver.com/solutions/multicore/ .

QNX ( http://www.qnx.com ) was also an early leader in multicore. The problem with Wind River and QNX, however, isn't really technical in nature, however. Both of these companies have recently been acquired (Wind River by Intel, QNX by RIM), and the business issue becomes one of their long term support and viability. The embedded mergers and acquisition process is literally a 'trail of tears,' watered by constant (empty) vendor pronouncements that they will 'continue' to 'support' (fill in the blank) architecture. So no doubt most business managers will shy away from vendors like QNX and Wind River (not to mention Monta Vista), as the sort out the M&A woes.

That said, take note of Mentor Graphic 's recent announcement, "Mentor Graphics Announces Multicore Solutions for Symmetric and Asymmetric Multiprocessing." Noteworthy beyond their technical enhancement of multicore (this time for the ARM platform) is the fact that Mentor remains one of the few, large, companies with both a powerful RTOS offering and a business position that they will probably remain independent for some time to come. (Details, here ).

Embedded Multicore Tools Support

Having an RTOS that supports multicore is a given, these days, for most significant RTOS vendors. What is more impressive is to have tools support for multicore. One of the more nimble RTOS vendors to do that is Express Logic ( http://www.rtos.com ). They recently announced the introduction of TraceX/MC™, a multicore-enabled and expanded version of their powerful TraceX graphical real-time event analysis tool. TraceX/MC enables embedded developers to visualize and better understand the behavior of their real-time systems by showing thread and core activity graphically across a common timescale. With TraceX/MC, system events like interrupts and context switches that occur out of view of standard debugging tools, can be seen clearly on each core. TraceX/MC introduces the ability to identify and study these events, and to pinpoint the timing and core on which they occurred. By offering such visibility into the overall system operation, TraceX/MC enables developers to resolve programming problems more easily, reducing the inordinate time typically spent debugging a multicore application. (More information, here ).

Another interesting tools announcement came in November, 2009, from Polycore. That company announced Poly-Inspector™, an application analysis tool. Poly-Inspector is an Eclipse GUI based, flexible tool that helps developers to quickly analyze application profiling information. Developers migrating applications from single to multicore, should start with an analysis of the application. The analysis begins with identifying application hot spots, which are prime candidates for distribution onto multiple cores. The resulting information is graphically displayed, enabling the developer to quickly browse the application call tree and interpret the data. Poly-Inspector can present performance information from profilers, simulators or traces. (More information, here ).

Finally, you should watch for closer collaboration between semiconductor vendors and tools partners, as witnessed by the CriticalBlue / Freescale announcement of 'close collaboration,' here . That cooperation is based around Prism, CriticalBlue's award-winning Eclipse™-based embedded multicore programming system that allows software engineers to easily assess and realize the full potential of multicore processors without significant change to their development flow.

RTOS and Embedded Support for Multicore - Top Learning Sites

We've already mentioned the Wind River multicore microsite, here . Even if you aren't willing to bet on Wind River's continued independence from Intel, it's a great learning site to start at. A good blog is the Multiprocessor Report . The best conference, The Multicore Expo was absorbed by the Embedded Systems Conference, which has both its pluses and minuses.

Perhaps the best mega site to get started at for practical multicore information is the Multicore Association . They have members, news, webinars, and more. It's a one stop launching point to see who is doing what, when, and where in multicore - both embedded and real-time operating system vendors. Highly recommended!

Finally, QNX has one of the better overviews to the topic, entitled simply, "Multicore Processing ", here . You can track everything multicore by eg3.com, at http://eg3.com/multicore.htm .

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Express Logic develops, markets and supports the ThreadX® real-time operating system (RTOS), NetX™TCP/IP networking stack, USBX™ USB stack, FileX® embedded file system, and PEGX™ GUI toolkit for embedded applications. ThreadX is a royalty-free, full source code, small-footprint, low-overhead RTOS that is extremely easy to learn and use. ThreadX is one of the most widely deployed RTOS products in the world, with over 1.25 billion products based on ThreadX.