OSEK OS Kernel Mechanisms for Reducing Dynamic Memory Usage

While the ever-increasing complexity of automotive software systems can be effectively managed through the adoption of a reliable real-time operating system (RTOS), it may incur additional resource usage to a resultant system. Due to the mass production nature of the automotive industry, reducing physical resources used by automotive software is of the utmost importance for cost reduction. OSEK OS is an automotive real-time kernel standard specifically defined to address this issue. Thus, it is very important to develop and exploit kernel mechanisms such that they can achieve minimal resource usage in the OSEK OS implementation. In this paper, we analyze the task subsystem, resource subsystem, application mode and conformance classes of OSEK OS as well as the OSEK Implementation Language (OIL). Based on our analysis, we in turn devise and implement kernel mechanisms to minimize the dynamic memory usage of the OSEK OS implementation. Finally, we show that our mechanisms effectively reduce the memory usage of OSEK OS and applications.N