Abstract
Embedded platforms with heterogeneous architecture, considered in this paper, consist of one primary and one or more secondary processors. Development of software systems for these platforms poses substantial difficulties, requiring a distinct set of tools for each constituent of the heterogeneous system. It also makes achieving high efficiency the more difficult task. Moreover, many use cases of embedded systems require runtime configuration, that cannot be easily achieved with usual approaches. This work presents a C-like metaprogramming DSL and a library that provides a unified interface for programming secondary processors of heterogeneous systems with this DSL. Together they help to resolve aforementioned problems. The DSL is embedded in C++ and allows to freely manipulate its expressions and thus embodies the idea of generative programming, when the expressive power of high-level C++ language is used to compose pieces of low-level DSL code. Together with other features, such as generic DSL functions, it makes the DSL a flexible and powerful tool for dynamic code generation. The approach behind the library is dynamic compilation: the DSL is translated to LLVM IR and then compiled to native executable code at runtime. It opens a possibility of dynamic code optimizations, e.g. runtime function specialization for specific parameters known only at runtime. Flexible library architecture allows simple extensibility to any target platform supported by LLVM. At the end of the paper a system approbation on different platforms and a demonstration of dynamic optimizations capability are presented.
Highlights
Embedded systems have been in a widespread use a long time, and today they become even more relevant because of the rapid development and adoption of new application fields, for example, Internet-of-Things, ”smart houses” and robotics
The new domain specific language (DSL) is completely abstracted from other parts of the library and can be used independently in other projects based on the idea of metaprogramming
We demonstrate system’s capabilities on a number of examples that show important features of the new DSL and some applications in embedded systems domain
Summary
Embedded systems have been in a widespread use a long time, and today they become even more relevant because of the rapid development and adoption of new application fields, for example, Internet-of-Things, ”smart houses” and robotics. Many of the embedded systems used in these areas have heterogeneous architectures due to nature of their tasks They consist of one primary, more powerful processor that executes the main program and performs common control, and one or several secondary microcontrollers or processors that provide read/write access to sensors and peripheral devices or may perform some other special functions. It may not be possible due to nature of the task or too often or rapid (for manual operating) changes of the environment Another variation of dynamic specialization scenario is a runtime configuration for specific peripheral devices (e.g. different models of sensors and actuators). Our library can help there in the case of sufficiently slowly changing environment (relative to a number of control cycles, when the time required for dynamic recompilation will pay off) It can be better shown on the specific example of PID controller tuning. The paper is closed with conclusion and discussion of possible directions of further work
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