IAR adds PX5 RTOS support for 64bit ARM chips
PX5 has added hard real-time Asymmetric Multiprocessing (AMP) and Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) support for its RTOS in the 64bit ARM architecture to IAR’s Embedded Workbench development environment.
This support for 64bit ARM processors adds load balancing and security features to hard real-time applications and complements existing PX5 RTOS ARM support for the 32bit Cortex-M, Cortex-R, and Cortex-A architectures in the IAR Workbench.
The hard real-time AMP and SMP support provided by the PXR RTOS includes dynamic pairing of ready application threads with available cores, enabling developers to concentrate on the application logic rather than a distribution of the workload across multiple processors. The PX5 RTOS SMP also allows the application to designate which cores each thread can execute on using several new APIs for setting and retrieving pre-thread processor affinity.
PX5 is a fifth-generation RTOS designed for the most demanding embedded applications with best-of-class size, performance, safety, and security built on a native implementation of the industry-standard POSIX pthreads API, including semaphore, mutex, and message queues, and offers real-time extensions such as event flags, fast queues, tick timers, and memory management.
This enables a wide range of software stacks—both open source and commercial—for real-time embedded IoT platforms, reducing time-to-market, improving device firmware quality, and enhancing portability across platforms.
The PX5 RTOS patent-pending Pointer/Data Verification (PDV) technology constitutes an integral part of an overall defence-in-depth strategy, by helping to detect and mitigate both accidental and malicious memory corruption of function pointers, function return addresses, internal system objects, and memory pools. Without PDV, memory corruption could go unnoticed and function pointer or stack corruption could open the door to remote execution attacks.
“Many applications that demand hard real-time and deterministic processing require capabilities well beyond those of embedded Linux, the most popular operating system for ARM 64-bit architectures,” said Bill Lamie, CEO of startup PX5. “With the growing demand for very high-performance AMP and SMP applications, like video processing and cellular modem, the PX5 RTOS hard real-time support promises to unleash the full performance and security benefits of Arm’s 64-bit Cortex architectures to meet the most demanding hard real-time designs.”
“The combination of IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM and PX5 maximizes the potential of development teams working with highly complex hard real-time systems,” said Lotta Frimanson, Director of Product Management at IAR. “Our long-standing relationship with Bill Lamie and PX5 demonstrates our commitment to helping developers expedite deployment of AMP and SMP applications and reduce development risks.”
