Booting an SMP RTOS from Bare Metal

ABSTRACT

While silicon vendors are taking the lead in bringing the multicore revolution to embedded markets, software developers of embedded operating systems, middleware, and applications are struggling to keep pace. A major hurdle is transiting to the multicore environment, which requires a paradigm shift in design strategies for legacy systems. This white paper addresses one such use-case, namely the initialization from bare metal of a homo-geneous multicore system. The focus here is to outline "need-to-update" areas in the RTOS boot sequence which include stack setup, kernel data initialization, and synchronization of cores during startup.