A Universal BSP Tool for Embedded OS Porting
Resource
The 2005 International Conference on Embedded Systems and Applications
Journal
The 2005 International Conference on Embedded Systems and Applications
Pages
-
Date Issued
2004
Date
2004
Author(s)
Abstract
As the increasing of system performance and computing power, embedded systems are more complicated and interactive. Therefore, operating system (OS) plays a more important role in embedded systems to utilize various hardware and software resources. System developers need to port various operating systems to various embedded hardware platform in order to meet the variability and fast-growing market requirement However, porting an operating system is not trivial even we thoroughly understand the hardware specification and software design. Moreover, how successful we can port an operating system not only decides time to market but also affects performance of the embedded system intensively. Usually, a board support package (BSP) is provided by manufacturers to support porting. However, the BSP is usually proprietary and not transparent to users. In this paper, we propose to release the porting problems by describing hardware specification and booting process of embedded systems in an open reusable document in XML format, BSPXML. We design a universal BSP tool to parse the BSPXML document and generate bootstrap code of any specific embedded OS on a target platform. Moreover, the BSP tool also provides BSP program interface for OS to call even after booting. We believe that the BSP tool is universal and it can ease OS porting process and shorten time-to-market for embedded systems.
Subjects
BSP; DTD; Embedded system; Operating system porting; XML
Other Subjects
Computer operating systems; Concurrent engineering; Embedded software; Integrated circuits; Markup languages; Software design; Specifications; XML; Board support packages; BSP; Computing power; DTD; Embedded hardwares; Embedded ossa; Growing markets; Hardware and softwares; Hardware specifications; Operating system porting; Porting problems; Program interfaces; System developers; Time to markets; Xml formats; Embedded systems
Type
conference paper