Event details

Android: real-time for the rest of us

von Gernot Hillier (Siemens AG, CT T, Munich), Wolfgang Mauerer (Siemens AG, Corporate Research and Technologies), Jan Sawallisch (Siemens AG)

Saturday, 26.05.2012, London, 17:30-18:00 Uhr

Android does not only meet the taste of end-users, but also provides a comfortable home for programmers with its polished development environment that feels very different to traditional embedded Linux. Unfortunately, the advantages vanish when hard real-time requirements enter the stage - they are not accounted for by the Android stack and app model, although they are needed in an every-growing number of scenarios. To combine the benefits of both realms, we have created a real-time capable Android solution (Androit).

We present the resulting software architecture, and discuss how we augmented the Android stack with RT capabilites. Besides giving use-cases, we report on our experience with integrating the Android and preempt_rt kernel patches, highlight the benefits for engineers, end users, and in hardware consolidation, and share how the advantages of Android can be extended to scenarios not covered by the standard architecture. A practical demonstration of real-time Android on a Motorola Xoom tablet might be given if time permits.

Über den Autor Gernot Hillier:

Gernot Hillier works as Consultant in the program "Open Source Platforms" at Siemens AG, Corporate Technology in Munich since 2003. He started using Linux back in 1998 when studying informatics at University of Applied Sciences, Landshut and fell in love with the Open Source model immediately. He wrote his diploma thesis at SUSE Linux AG and today holds lectures about Linux System programming at UAS Landshut besides his job as Embedded Linux Consultant at Siemens Munich.

Über den Autor Wolfgang Mauerer:

Wolfgang Mauerer has been writing documentation on various Linux and Unix related topics for the last 10+ years, and has closely tracked linux kernel development during this time. He is the author of books on text processing with LaTeX and about the architecture of the Linux kernel, and has written numerous papers and articles. He holds a PhD in quantum physics for which he worked at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, mostly using Linux for scientific tasks (numerical simulation of quantum systems and quantum programming languages). Currently, he is with Siemens CT Research and Technologies, dealing with virtualisation and real-time topics.

Über den Autor Jan Sawallisch:

I am a software and systems engineer of the Corporate Technology Department of Siemens AG with broad expertise in distributed embedded systems. Furthermore I gained significant experience in the area of mobile communication and automotive systems.

My work currently focuses on embedded platforms, design methodologies, device driver adaptations and operating system integrations, especially for automotive applications.

Key Expertise
• software architecture for embedded systems
• device driver, boot loader and network protocol design for embedded systems
• hard real-time applications and simulations
• tool chain improvement for software development of embedded systems
• AUTOSAR meta model expertise
• project management