Open Source Summit Europe 2024

SoCs are increasingly heterogeneous, featuring multiple processor clusters and special-purpose accelerators. Consequently, Asymmetric Multiprocessing (AMP) systems must support different operating environments concurrently on the same chip. This talk will outline the software architecture necessary to develop applications for AMP systems, enabling operating systems to interact across a range of complex homogeneous and heterogeneous architectures. This allows AMP applications to utilize the parallelism offered by various configurations. We perform prototyping on low-cost RISC-V processor cores configured as AMP systems running the Linux kernel and RTOSes such as ThreadX. This setup involves an IPC layer that implements RPMSG communication between cores. Additionally, our proxy infrastructure showcases the ability of a proxy on the master core to handle POSIX library calls from RTOS-based remote contexts.