MENTOR EMBEDDED Multicore Framework D A T A S H E E T SOLUTION FEATURES: ■■ Configure and deploy multiple operating systems across homogeneous or heterogeneous processor cores ■■ Consolidation of the system – including discrete components ■■ Supports native, virtualized, and trusted configurations of multiple operating systems The Mentor Embedded Multicore Framework enables a broad portfolio of solutions in complex homogeneous or heterogeneous cores. Addressing Hardware complexity and Advanced Multicore Architectures Today’s complex system-on-chip (SoC) architectures are combining more application-class and microcontroller-class cores than ever before. As a result, consolidation of heterogeneous operating environments on a single device is much harder to achieve – and more difficult for developers to utilize the underlying hardware. While symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) operating architectures allow load balancing of the application across homogeneous processors within the multicore infrastructure, they do not scale to heterogeneous cores. Further, there is a lack of accepted standards and software design paradigms to take full advantage of asymmetric multiprocessing (AMP), even on homogeneous multicore SoCs. Having certain mechanisms in place would enable AMP applications to leverage parallelism offered by the multicore configuration. Embedded virtualization allows the mixing and matching of SMP and AMP environments and supervises some of the operating systems while managing payload on the cores. Introducing the Mentor Embedded Multicore Framework To address these design complexities, Mentor Graphics has created the Mentor® Embedded Multicore Framework allowing developers to configure and deploy multiple operating systems and applications across homogeneous or heterogeneous processors. This comprehensive framework enables developers to manage the many challenges associated with inter-process communication (IPC), resource management and sharing, process control, debugging, and application optimization within a multicore environment by supporting native, virtualized, and trusted configurations of multiple operating systems. The Framework allows software developers to control the boot-up and shut down of individual cores on a SoC, thus allowing applications to maximize compute performance or minimize power consumption based on individual use case scenarios. ■■ Simplified booting ■■ System-wide communication ■■ System level visualization of heterogeneous system behavior ■■ Common toolchain supports the entire solution enabling heterogeneous system development, debug, and analysis BENEFITS: Enables consolidation Leverage multiple operating systems within a multicore design while easily managing payloads across processor cores Manage compute performance and power consumption Developers are given control over boot-up and which cores to shut down on a SoC, also helping to manage power consumption Locate and fix problems deep in the system Powerful tools allow developers to see deep inside multiple cores and fix problems quickly on a single common timeline Part of a larger multicore ecosystem Mentor’s broad portfolio of runtime environments, integrated tools, services, and partner technologies allow projects to start quickly and innovation to begin earlier

Once the remote processor OS and application stack are running, many use cases will require communication with other parts of the system. The Framework provides a cleanroom implementation of a remote processor messaging framework feature called rpmsg to establish a communications channel between the master operating system and the remote operating systems. In this way data can be passed back and forth between the two in an inter-processor communication channel. The transport layer that enables both remote processor lifecycle management and inter-processor communication is VirtlO. VirtIO is a...