Multiprocessing with Real-Time Operating Systems

摘要

Although the concept of a multiprocessor system has been around for decades, it's only recently attained commer-cial viability as demand grows for scalable, high-perfor-mance, highly reliable systems. This increased demand for so-called "highly available" CPU-intensive systems (sys-tems with 99.999% uptime) has spawned several types of multiprocessor systems, each designed for a specific application. Multiprocessor systems are widely used in applications involving 3D graphics with audio/video compression and decompression running on specialized multiprocessor chips (for example, Fuzion 150 from PixelFusion). These systems are also seen in high bandwidth network traffic switch/router designs, including special network management features on specialized multiprocessors (for example, SB1250 with SB-1 chip of Broadcom's Mercurian family of programmable network processors). This article focuses on a specific type of multiprocessor system, the tightly coupled shared-memory symmetric multiprocessor (SMP), and how it's supported by a typical real-time operating system (RTOS).