Approaches To Providing Data Visualization On Devices Using Modern Real-time Operating Systems

The paper considers various approaches to developing display controller driver software for embedded systems, which usually use System-on-chip (SOC) solutions and real-time operating systems (RTOS). It also describes the main principles and design decisions of the chosen RTOS, such as portability, flexible scheduling, responsiveness, etc., as well as used standards (C language, POSIX 1003.1, ARINC 653). The authors list general operating principles of the display controller hardware including support for several displays and overlays that can be used for displaying multiple video streams on one screen or achieving the effect similar to chroma keying. The proposed method for developing display controller drivers defines the main parameters of the display controller hardware and the steps necessary to show an image on a screen correctly. The meth-od also takes into account the features related to using hardware interrupts and estimating the frequen-cy required for display controller to show an image on a screen correctly with the defined screen mode. Contrary to the known methods, the proposed method takes into account various features of the many real-time operating systems: lack of dedicated API to interact with graphics hardware and resources, seamless access to hardware registers from user space and so on. The paper considers several ap-proaches to debugging software on the target hardware as well as using prototyping systems based on FPGA. Prototyping systems usually introduce additional challenges to debugging, such as low simula-tion speed. The proposed method was tested during the development of the display controller driver for the home made RTOS.