Reducing OS overhead for real-time industrial controllers with adjustable timer resolution

In this paper, a new method, named adjustable timer resolution (ATR) is proposed to control tasks in a timely manner, with enhanced performance on real-time operating systems. It prevents useless execution of the timer interrupt service routine (ISR). Features of the proposed method are compared with the conventional method, and the schedulability is analyzed to estimate the performance. As an implementation model, uC/OS-II is modified and ported to a power PC processor system. The metrics and results of the model are presented and discussed.