Express Logic, a supplier of royalty-free real-time operating systems (RTOS), and PolyCore Software, a multicore communications middleware specialist, claim to have the first commercial RTOS integration of the Multicore Association’s recently released Multicore Communications API (MCAPI) specification.
The key is that the MCAPI-supported RTOS will allow for applications to be developed, and functionally debugged, on a single processor or simulator using virtual nodes before being ported to the multicore target hardware.
This means that development can start before the multicore hardware is available. It also has the potential to simplify debugging and application scaling.
“As multicore systems become more prevalent in high-performance embedded computing, this will help address the software challenges of these systems with a standardised API that is both efficient and scalable,” said William Lamie, president of Express Logic.
MCAPI is being proposed as an implementation agnostic API for multicore systems communications and this joint development provides MCAPI support for applications running Express Logic’s ThreadX RTOS.
This is achieved with a version of PolyCore’s multicore firmware known as Poly-Messenger which effectively links the various application threads, running on ThreadX, across multiple cores.
“Through this integration, developers can choose to use ThreadX alone or alongside any other Poly-Messenger/MCAPI-supported OS to more easily program multicore applications,” said Lamie.
It also raises the possibility of reusing legacy code, so that previously written single-processor multithreaded code can be distributed across multiple cores.