Hardware/software partitioning of operating systems: focus on deadlock avoidance

This chapter presents a methodology for hardware/software partitioning of operating systems among pre-designed hardware and software RTOS pieces. The δ hard ware/software RTOS/MPSoC codesign framework has been used to configure and generate simulatable RTOS/MPSoC designs having both appropriate hardware and software interfaces for each specified system architecture. The δ framework is specifically designed to help RTOS/MPSoC designers more easily and quickly explore their design space with available hardware and software modules so that they can effi ciently search and discover a few optimal solutions matched to the specifications and requirements of their design.In summary, we present recent updates to the δ hardware software RTOS partitioning framework. We focus on the DAU and the PBAU, the first work known to the authors on hardware support for deadlock avoidance in MPSoC/RTOS hardware/software codesign.