• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.205-212
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• 2017

Linux Foundation has announced a real-time kernel, called Zephyr, for IoT applications recently. Zephyr kernel provides synchronous and asynchronous IPC for data communication between threads. Synchronous IPC is useful for programming multi-threads that need to be executed synchronously, since the sender thread is blocked until the data is delivered to the receiver thread and the completion of data transfer can be known to two threads. In general, 'IPC execution time' is defined as the time duration between the sender thread sends data and the receiver thread receives the data sent. Especially, it is important that 'IPC execution time' in the synchronous IPC should be fixed in real-time kernel like Zephyr. However, we have found that the execution time of the synchronous IPC in Zephyr kernel increases in proportion to the number of threads executing in the kernel. In this paper, we propose a method to implement a fixed time synchronous IPC in Zephyr kernel using Direct Thread Switching(DTS) technique. Using the technique, the receiver thread executes directly after the sender thread sends a data during the remaining time slice of the sender thread and we can archive a fixed IPC execution time even when the number of threads executing in the kernel increases. In this paper, we implemented synchronous IPC using DTS in the Zephyr kernel and found the IPC execution time of the IPC is always 389 cycle that is relatively small and fixed.