Mentor Embedded Multicore Framework

Manage Inter-processor Communication (IPC)

Establish a communications channel between the master operating system and the remote operating systems with a cleanroom implementation of rpmsg allowing data to be passed across the channel. The transport layer manages the remote processor lifecycle and IPC with VirtIO.

Remote Processor Lifecycle Management

The remoteproc feature allows remote processor interoperability between Mentor Embedded Linux, Mentor Embedded Nucleus RTOS, and bare metal environments. Using remoteproc, the OS and/or application stack can be started and stopped, benefiting the remote processor lifecycle management by reducing power consumption due to low power state when not in use.

The boot order across the cores is managed to ensure overall performance during boot-up and shutdown, OS and application priority.

Consolidate Discrete Systems

Today’s complex system-on-chip (SoC) architectures are combining more application-class and microcontroller-class cores than ever before. As a result, consolidation of heterogeneous operating environments on a single device is much harder to achieve and more difficult for developers to utilize the underlying hardware.

The advantages of these complex architectures can be fully realized with Multicore Framework by consolidating the functionality from discrete parts into a single SoC, resulting in less silicon and reduced BOM and footprint costs.

System Analysis and Visualization

Developers must be able to visualize how the heterogeneous components interact with each other in the system. Because the systems are consolidated on shared hardware, the possibility of resource contention and bottlenecks are greatly increased.

Development tools help identify the contentions and bottlenecks, allowing developers to quickly find solutions to the problems. Sourcery™ CodeBench with built-in Sourcery™ Analyzer have been integrated to allow various OS and virtualized guest runtimes, along with the applications, to be visualized on a single common timeline.