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Efficient Design of High-Resolution Timekeeping in Real-Time Operating Systems

Authors Federico Terraneo , Daniele Cattaneo

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Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Computer systems organization → Real-time operating systems
  • Software and its engineering → Scheduling
  • Software and its engineering → Multiprocessing / multiprogramming / multitasking
Keywords
  • RTOS
  • Task Scheduling
  • Multiprocessing

Metrics

Abstract

High-resolution timekeeping is a desirable feature in real-time operating systems targeting microcontrollers, which traditionally has been held back due to its impact on context switch overhead. In this paper we present the design of a timing subsystem that decouples preemption from the timekeeping operation. This design, making use of 1+N hardware timers, significantly speeds up the context switch code while scaling effectively to multi-core microcontroller architectures with N cores. Preliminary experimental results on the Miosix fluid kernel show the effectiveness of the proposed design.

Cite As Get BibTex

Federico Terraneo and Daniele Cattaneo. Efficient Design of High-Resolution Timekeeping in Real-Time Operating Systems. In 7th Workshop on Next Generation Real-Time Embedded Systems (NG-RES 2026). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 140, pp. 4:1-4:15, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026) https://doi.org/10.4230/OASIcs.NG-RES.2026.4

Author Details

Federico Terraneo
  • DEIB - Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Daniele Cattaneo
  • DEIB - Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Funding

We acknowledge financial support under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRPP), call for tender No. 104 published on 02/02/2022 by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR), funded by the European Union - Next Generation EU, Mission 4, Component 1, CUP D53D23008590001 and D53D23008600006, project title LibreRT.

Supplementary Materials

References

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