HiRTOS: a Multicore RTOS Written in SPARK Ada

by J. German Rivera at Ada Developers Workshop 2024.
This presentation will describe the Ada-specific details of the design of HiRTOS and how to port it to new platforms. HiRTOS is a small multicore RTOS kernel and separation kernel. An RTOS is a safety critical component of any bare-metal embedded software system. Yet, most RTOSes are written in C which is an unsafe language. It would be safer to use an RTOS written in a safer language, such as Ada or even better SPARK Ada. However, integrating Ada code components in bare-metal embedded firmware written in other languages, typically C, is not easy in a portable manner, as the available baremetal GNAT cross-compilers require the availability of an Ada Runtime for the target micrcontroller or embedded platform, and such baremetal Ada runtimes are available only for a very limited number of platforms. HiRTOS solves this problem by being implemented on top of a minimal platform-independent Ada runtime. Also, HiRTOS code itself has been written on top of a porting layer that provides a platform-agnostic interface to HiRTOS. Currently, only one porting layer for the ARM Cortex-R52 multi-core processor is provided. To port HiRTOS to a new target platform, all that is needed is to implement the porting layer for the new target platform.
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