Lowering the Development Costs of Network Elements through Software Partitioning

Growing Complexity

Networking and telecommunication OEMs are at the forefront of design complexity. A network element can contain hundreds of thousands or even millions of source ...

Partitioning as a Solution

Recently, the concept of partitioning has gained mindshare as a way to manage these complex integration issues. Briefly stated, this approach allows design teams to ...

Managing Priorities

A priority-based scheduler isn't a "fair share" scheduler. The highest-priority task with work to do can monopolize the CPU and starve all other tasks of CPU time. Consequently ...

Watchdog Processes

Sometimes, a group of related threads will starve other threads of CPU time. In other cases, starvation results from a single "runaway" thread that runs in ...

OS-controlled Time Partitioning

Some RTOSs support CPU time partitioning. This concept provides a container for processes and threads, called a partition, that can be allocated a guaranteed share ...

Simplifying Parallel Development and Integration Testing

Time partitioning facilitates parallel development by allowing the system designer to define a CPU budget for each subsystem. This approach ...

Quantifying Development Savings

Using the build, test, find, and fix method to deal with task starvation is an expensive proposition. Often, starvation results in intermittent, unexplained ...

Minimum Effort

As complexity and code size grows, the probability that task starvation and other software defects will make their way into final product also grows. The cost of resolving ...