Overview of Azure RTOS ThreadX
Azure RTOS ThreadX is Microsoft's advanced industrial grade Real-Time Operating System (RTOS). It is designed specifically for deeply embedded, real-time, and IoT applications. Azure RTOS ThreadX provides advanced scheduling, communication, synchronization, timer, memory management, and interrupt management facilities. In addition, Azure RTOS ThreadX has many advanced features: including its picokernel™ architecture, preemption-threshold™ scheduling, event-chaining,™ execution profiling, performance metrics, and system event tracing. Combined with its superior ease-of-use, Azure RTOS ThreadX is the ideal choice for the most demanding of embedded applications. Azure RTOS ThreadX has billions of deployments across a wide variety of products, including consumer devices, medical electronics, and industrial control equipment.
ThreadX footprint
Azure RTOS ThreadX has a remarkably small 2-KB instruction area and 1 KB of RAM minimal footprint. This small size is largely due to its non-layered picokernel architecture and automatic scaling. Automatic scaling means that only the services (and supporting infrastructure) used by the application are included in the final image at link time.
Here are some typical Azure RTOS ThreadX size characteristics.
| Azure RTOS ThreadX Service | Typical Size in Bytes |
|---|---|
| Core Services (Require) | 2,000 |
| Queue Services | 900 |
| Event Flag Services | 900 |
| Semaphore Services | 450 |
| Mutex Services | 1,200 |
| Block Memory Services | 550 |
| Byte Memory Services | 900 |
ThreadX execution speed
Azure RTOS ThreadX achieves a sub-microsecond context switch on most popular processors and is faster overall than other commercial RTOSs. In addition to being fast, Azure RTOS ThreadX is also highly deterministic. It achieves the same fast performance whether there are 200 threads ready, or just one.
Here are some typical performance characteristics of Azure RTOS ThreadX:
Fast boot: Azure RTOS ThreadX boots in fewer than 120 cycles.
Optional removal of basic error checking: Basic Azure RTOS ThreadX error checking can be skipped at compile time. This can be useful when the application code is verified and no longer requires error checking on each parameter. Skipping error checking can be done on a compilation unit, rather than system-wide.
Picokernel design: Services are not layered on each other, eliminating unnecessary function call overhead.
Optimized interrupt processing: Only scratch registers are saved/restored upon ISR entry/exit, unless preemption is necessary.
Optimized API processing:
Azure RTOS ThreadX Service Service Time in Microseconds* Thread Suspend 0.6 Thread Resume 0.6 Queue Send 0.3 Queue Receive 0.3 Get Semaphore 0.2 Put Semaphore 0.2 Context Switch 0.4 Interrupt Response 0.0 – 0.6 *Performance figures based on typical processor running at 200 MHz.
Advanced technology
Azure RTOS ThreadX is notable for its preemption-threshold scheduling. This feature is unique to Azure RTOS ThreadX and has been the subject of extensive academic research. You can learn more from the paper Scheduling Fixed-Priority Tasks with Preemption Threshold, by Yun Wang (Concordia University) and Manas Saksena (University of Pittsburgh).
Key capabilities of Azure RTOS ThreadX:
- Complete and Comprehensive Multitasking Facilities
- Threads, application timers, message queues, counting semaphores, mutexes, event flags, block, and byte memory pools
- Priority-Based Preemptive Scheduling
- Priority Flexibility – Up to 1024 Priority Levels
- Cooperative Scheduling
- Preemption-Threshold – Unique to Azure RTOS ThreadX, helps reduce context switches and help guarantee schedulability (per academic research)
- Memory Protection via Azure RTOS ThreadX MODULES
- Fully Deterministic
- Event Trace – Capture last n system/application events
- Event Chaining – Register an application-specific “notify” callback function for each Azure RTOS ThreadX communication or synchronization object
- Azure RTOS ThreadX MODULES with Optional Memory Protection
- Run-Time Performance Metrics
- Number of thread resumptions
- Number of thread suspensions
- Number of solicited thread pre-emptions
- Number of asynchronous thread interrupt pre-emptions
- Number of thread priority inversions
- Number of thread relinquishes
- Execution Profile Kit (EPK)
- Separate Interrupt Stack
- Run-Time Stack Analysis
- Optimized Timer Interrupt Processing
Multicore support (AMP & SMP)
Standard Azure RTOS ThreadX is often used in an Asymmetric Multiprocessing (AMP) fashion, where a separate copy of Azure RTOS ThreadX and the application (or Linux) executes on each core and communicate with each other via shared memory or an inter-processor communication mechanism such as OpenAMP (Azure RTOS ThreadX supports OpenAMP).
In environments where loading processors is highly dynamic, Azure RTOS ThreadX Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) is available for the following processor families:
- ARM Cortex-Ax
- ARM Cortex-Rx
- ARM Cortex-A5x 64-bit
- Synopsys ARC HS
Azure RTOS ThreadX SMP performs dynamic load balancing across n processors. It allows all Azure RTOS ThreadX resources (queues, semaphores, event flags, memory pools, etc.) to be accessed by any thread on any core. Azure RTOS ThreadX SMP enables the complete Azure RTOS ThreadX API on all cores and introduces the following new APIs applicable to SMP operation:
UINT tx_thread_smp_core_exclude(TX_THREAD *thread_ptr, ULONG exclusion_map);UINT tx_thread_smp_core_exclude_get(TX_THREAD *thread_ptr, ULONG *exclusion_map_ptr);UINT tx_thread_smp_core_get(void);UINT tx_timer_smp_core_exclude(TX_TIMER *timer_ptr, ULONG exclusion_map);UINT tx_timer_smp_core_exclude_get(TX_TIMER *timer_ptr, ULONG *exclusion_map_ptr);
Memory protection via Azure RTOS ThreadX Modules
An add-on product called Azure RTOS ThreadX Modules enables one or more application threads to be bundled into a “Module” that can be dynamically loaded and run (or executed in place) on the target.
Modules enable field upgrade, bug fixing, and program partitioning to allow large applications to occupy only the memory needed by active threads.
Modules also have a separate address space from Azure RTOS ThreadX itself. This enables Azure RTOS ThreadX to place memory protection (via MPU or MMU) around the Module such that accidental access outside the module will not be able to corrupt any other software component.
MISRA compliant
Azure RTOS ThreadX and Azure RTOS ThreadX SMP source code is MISRA-C: 2004 and MISRA C:2012 compliant. MISRA C is a set of programming guidelines for critical systems using the C programming language. The original MISRA C guidelines were primarily targeted toward automotive applications; however, MISRA C is now widely recognized as being applicable to any safety-critical application. Azure RTOS ThreadX is compliant with all required and mandatory rules of MISRA-C: 2004 and MISRA C:2012.
Supports most popular tools
Azure RTOS ThreadX supports most popular embedded development tools, including IAR’s Embedded Workbench, which also has the most comprehensive Azure RTOS ThreadX kernel awareness available. Other tool integration includes GNU (GCC), ARM DS-5/uVision®, Green Hills MULTI®, Wind River Workbench, Imagination Codescape, Renesas e2studio, Metaware SeeCode, NXP CodeWarrior, Lauterbach TRACE32®, TI Code-Composer Studio, CrossCore, and all analog devices.
Adaptation layer for ThreadX
You can ease application migration issues to Azure RTOS by using ThreadX adaption layers for various legacy RTOS APIs (FreeRTOS, POSIX, OSEK, etc.)