Category Archives: embedded systems

Toyota’s problem: hardware weenies and poor accounting practices [updated]

Posted on February 6, 2010 by admin

Jamie Kitman’s look at the twisted path Toyota followed to it’s current difficulties inspired me to think about software and money – two topics I spend way too much time thinking about. As a purely disinterested observer (ahem) it has … Continue reading →

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Deterministic multithreading

Posted on August 10, 2009 by admin

An interesting paper appearing in ASPLOS proceedings provides a “deterministic” locking method Kendo enforces a deterministic interleaving of lock acquisitions and specially declared non-protected reads through a novel dynamically load-balanced deterministic scheduling algorithm. The algorithm tracks the progress of each … Continue reading →

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RTOS design and embedded system development

Posted on July 15, 2009 by admin

Real-time operating systems are either a solved problem or a backwater of engineering design. Threads, semaphores, mutexes, some basic I/O, priority scheduling all of this has been more or less standardized in the  POSIX 1003.13 smaller profiles (51,52) for many … Continue reading →

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