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About

OSPERT 2023 is a satellite workshop of the 35th Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS 2023), the premier European venue for presenting research into the broad area of real-time and embedded systems. OSPERT is open to all topics related to providing a reliable operating environment for real-time and embedded applications.

Keynote

Speaker: Ulrich Drepper (Red Hat)

Title: Co-Developing Hardware and Software

Abstract — The granularity at which hardware SKUs are available usually means that one uses a more-or-less general development platform. On top of this, at best, a customized real-time OS is deployed, which due to portability, is written with compromises in the HAL and user API.

In the Red Hat CoDes lab at Boston University, we are developing solutions that allow specifying the exact needs of the program(s) to run and which creates from this specification and the program code everything from the exact specification of the hardware (how many cores, what ISA, what extensions, what interfaces like DDR, Ethernet, PCIe, SPI, GPIO, etc) to the bootloader, debugger interfaces, OS with standard interfaces and further on to an integrated development environment for the software developer.

The goal is to create an efficient platform to deploy the application with complexity a developer already handles fine on hardware based on FPGAs, which allows a common hardware design used in many situations.  All this, of course, with fleet management, documents, and design security models.

This talk will give a short overview of the current state and what we hope to achieve.

Bio

Ulrich Drepper joined Red Hat again in 2017 after a seven-year hiatus when he worked for Goldman Sachs. He works in the Red Hat Research group, which is part of the office of the CTO. As part of his job, he looks after the ongoing projects the group is working on. He specifically concentrates on developing new technologies for efficient computing for high-performance needs or limited energy budgets with the help of customized hardware/software solutions.

In his last position at Goldman Sachs, he worked on various areas, such as stochastic algorithms to aid in operation, consulting internally on high-performance and low-latency development, and teaching classes around computing fundamentals and machine learning.

His previous stint at Red Hat lasted 14 years. The last position was as a member of the office of the CTO to collect and disseminate information relevant to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux product, predominantly in the high-performs area. During this time and back to the earliest days of Linux, he developed the basic runtime and development tools still in use today.

Scope and Topics of Interest

OSPERT is open to a broad spectrum of topics related to providing a reliable, predictable, and efficient operating environment for real-time and embedded applications.

Embedded systems are undergoing a profound transformation with the goal of delivering higher performance for next-generation real-time systems.  Following this trend, research on innovative RTOS architectures and advanced resource management techniques continues to be a hot topic. Developers of embedded RTOSs are faced with many challenges arising from two opposite needs: on the one hand, there is a need for extreme resource usage optimization (processor cycles, cache and memory footprint, energy, network bandwidth, etc.), and on the other hand, there are also increasing demands in terms of scalability, flexibility, isolation, adaptivity, reconfigurability, predictability, serviceability, and certifiability, to name a few.

Further, while special-purpose RTOSs continue to be used for many embedded applications, real-time services are also increasingly introduced and used in general-purpose operating systems and cloud environments, where “tail latency” and QoS are a concern. The resulting market pressure continues to blur the line between the two formerly distinct classes of operating systems. Notable examples are the various flavors of real-time Linux that support time-sensitive applications, the emergence of commercial and open-source real-time hypervisors, as well as the growth in features and scope of embedded OS and middleware specifications such as AUTOSAR.

OSPERT is dedicated to the advances in RTOS technology required to address these trends. As such, areas of interest include, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Case studies and experience reports
• Consolidation of real-time and best-effort work on embedded platforms
• Certification and verification of RTOSs and middleware
• Coordinated management of multiple resources
• Dynamic reconfiguration and upgrading
• Empirical comparisons and evaluations of RTOSs
• Flexible processor, memory, and I/O scheduling
• Interaction with reconfigurable hardware
• Operating system standards (e.g., AUTOSAR, ARINC, POSIX, etc.)
• Power and energy management
• Quality of Service guarantees
• Real-time Linux variants
• Real-time virtualization and hypervisors
• RTOSs for manycore platforms
• Scalability, from very small-scale embedded systems to full-fledged RTOSs
• Security and fault tolerance for embedded real-time systems
• Support for multiprocessor, accelerator-/FPGA-enabled, architectures
• Support for component-based development

Call for Contributions [TXT | PDF]

OSPERT is a forum for researchers and engineers working on (and with) Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOSs) to present recent advances in RTOS technology, promote new and existing initiatives and projects, and identify and discuss the challenges that lie ahead. The workshop, established in 2005, provides the RTOS community with an opportunity to meet, exchange ideas, network, and discuss future directions.

OSPERT’23 strives for an inclusive and diverse program and solicits various contributions. To this end, the following types of submissions are sought:

1. proposals for technical presentations (including talks on open problems, demos & tutorials, calls to action, etc.);
2. proposals for reports on empirical experiments (including replication studies, preliminary experiments, and experience reports); and
3. technical papers (short papers and full workshop papers).

The submission of a full paper is not required to present work at OSPERT. See the detailed description of the different types of contributions and the submission instructions for details.

Further information:

• Contribution formats & details
• Submission instructions