| dc.description.abstract | This thesis aims to enable a planned effort to port a legacy system to a new hardware and software platform. The target platform is an Altera Cyclone V running a custom Linux distribution shared across several products within the company where the author is employed. Although not an inherent real-time system, the legacy system has several real-time constraints that must be met on the new platform to function as intended. Despite being a general-purpose operating system, many approaches exist to improve the real-time capabilities of Linux, such as the PREEMPT_RT patchset. This study’s primary focus is investigating the viability of porting the legacy system to the new platform and determining the best approach for meeting the system’s temporal requirements.
The first part of the thesis focuses on benchmarking a generic Linux system with different kernel settings to evaluate the impact of using different preemption models and scheduling policies. The second part analyzes the legacy system’s requirements and mechanics. Further, it evaluates, implements, and tests software mechanisms that mimic the legacy system’s time-critical functionality on the new platform.
This study showed that the PREEMPT_RT patch can improve the real-time capabilities of Linux but also introduces issues that can negatively impact the system. Additionally, it shows that the mainline kernel performs reasonably well and can be satisfactory for many systems.
The thesis concludes that the porting effort is feasible, potentially without requiring particular measures. The results show that the real-time constraints of the legacy system are not stringent enough to warrant the use of PREEMPT_RT. However, a preemptible low-latency kernel and real-time scheduling policies are recommended to improve the system’s reliability and stability. The thesis also presents several recommendations regarding the target application’s design and mechanics. Future work includes porting and testing the legacy system on the new platform and implementing the recommended modifications to the system. | |
