Many of you know that I have been working on an SMP design for RTEMS for a couple of years now as a background activity. This has been a slow project and I have been wanting to work on it more but it has been almost entirely volunteer activity on my part. But recently, the activity level has picked up. Gedare Bloom's GSOC proposal Modular SuperCore Scheduler Manager will make a significant dent in the work required to support SMP. Currently, there is no discrete Scheduler component in the RTEMS SuperCore and a big part of supporting SMP is to have a single processor and an SMP-aware scheduler. To properly support this, there has to be a discrete Scheduler component in the SuperCore and a mechanism to select alternate schedulers. Gedare's project is to refactor the existing code base and provide a SuperCore Scheduler Handler along with the configuration required. Gedare has previously implemented an Earliest Deadline First (EDF) Scheduler for RTEMS and we are planning for this to be available as one of the alternative schedulers. Tiny/RTEMS may even benefit because it may make sense to have a light-weight scheduler algorithm for lower end target processors.
With Gedare focusing on refactoring the Scheduler, I have felt free to focus on the process of initializing a multicore processor, interprocessor interrupts, spinlocks, and transferring control to the first thread on a secondary core. I have succeeded in demonstrating these on pc386 with up to 32 cores and on SPARC/LEON3 with four cores. This work has let me work through the definition of a per CPU OS structure as well as the BSP/RTEMS SMP Interface. If you are interested in experimenting with this on another architecture, let me know.
I am looking forward to working this summer with Gedare and seeing how close we get to SMP RTEMS support before the 2010 Summer of Code is over.
