The Rationale for Distributed Semantics as a Topology Independent Embedded Systems Design Methodology and its Implementation in the Virtuoso RTOS

Virtuoso VSP is a fully distributed real-time operating system originally developed on the Inmos transputer. Its generic architecture is based on a small but very fast nanokernel and a portable preemptive microkernel. It was further on ported in single and virtual single processor implementations to a wide range of processors. This paper describes the rationale for developing the distributed semantics of Virtuoso’s microkernel and describes some of the implementation issues. The analysis is based on the parallel DSP implementations as these push the performance limits most for hard real-time applications. Extensions of the model towards heterogeneous embedded target systems are discussed.