RTDroid

Abstract

There has been much recent interest in adding support for real-time capabilities to Android. Proposed architectures for doing so fall into four broad categories, but only two support real-time Android applications. These two proposals include a real-time garbage collector for real-time memory management and a real-time operating system for real-time scheduling and resource management. Although they provide the fundamental building blocks for real-time Android, unfortunately such proposals are incomplete. In this paper we examine the Android programming model, libraries, and core systems services in the context of the Fiji real-time VM coupled with the RT Linux and RTEMS real-time operating systems. We show that even with a real-time operating system as well as real-time memory management, the predictability of core Android constructs is poor. To address this limitation we propose a preliminary RTDroid design and show its applicability to real-time systems.