CAmkES: Component Architecture for microkernel-based Embedded Systems

Composing Embedded Systems Software

The CAmkES project provides a solution for quickly and reliably building complex microkernel-based embedded systems software.

Motivation

CAmkES is a platform that abstracts the low-level mechanisms of a microkernel, providing communication primitives and support for decomposition of a system into functional units. With this platform as a base, embedded systems software is designed as a set of protected and separated services that communicate with each other through highly efficient and secure interprocess communication mechanisms. Given that services are protected from each other by a combination of a proven kernel and hardware protection, resulting systems have the potential to be highly reliable and secure.

The design of such a modular system becomes increasingly complicated as the number of services and degrees of interconnection grow. In addition to the platform itself, CAmkES provides a model and tools that reduce this complexity and makes the design and implementation of large microkernel-based systems feasible.

Approach

Using a component-based software development approach to building microkernel-based embedded systems software, the system is modelled as a set of interacting software components. These software components have explicit interaction interfaces, and a system design details the connections between components. Furthermore, the components are designed in such a way as to be reusable in different systems and not to rely on the implementation specifics of the connection mechanisms. This enables more rapid development and more manageable systems.

Challenges

Component-based development shifts the development emphasis from programming software to composing software systems. It brings with it obvious benefits for embedded systems such as reusability, maintainability, and a reduction of software complexity which leads to improved productivity. However, applying component-based development in the embedded domain also introduces several new concepts and challenges.

• Resource-constrained environments;
• Desirable flexibility for component design and implementation, through parameterisation and configuration;
• Component reusability, exemplified by independence from their environment; and
• Support for a variety of computational models (or architectural styles), including event-based models, dataflow models, etc.

Status

Current areas of active CAmkES research are the correctness of component systems and architectural-level system design.

Archived information about prior CAmkES research can be found here.

The CAmkES technology has been licensed to Open Kernel Labs for integration into their products. The CAmkES framework for OKL4 has been released as open source. Please see our software pages for more information and to download it.

Further Documentation

Further information about the design and implementation of CAmkES can be found on the following pages:

• General CAmkES design
• Development of CAmkES-based embedded systems

People

Publications

		Matthew Fernandez, Ihor Kuz and Gerwin Klein Formalisation of a component platform Poster Presentation, Operating Systems Design and Implementation 2012, Hollywood, CA, USA, October, 2012.
		Nicholas FitzRoy-Dale Architecture optimisation PhD Thesis, School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of NSW, Sydney 2052, Australia, 2011
		Nicholas FitzRoy-Dale and Ihor Kuz Towards automatic performance optimisation of componentised systems 2nd Workshop on Isolation and Integration in Embedded Systems, Nuremberg, Germany, April, 2009
		Gernot Heiser, Kevin Elphinstone, Ihor Kuz, Gerwin Klein and Stefan M. Petters Towards trustworthy computing systems: Taking microkernels to the next level ACM Operating Systems Review, Volume 41, Number 4, pp. 3–11, July, 2007
		Ihor Kuz and Yan Liu Extending the capabilities of component models for embedded systems International Conference on the Quality of Software-Architectures (QoSA), Boston, MA, USA, July, 2007
		Ihor Kuz, Yan Liu, Ian Gorton and Gernot Heiser CAmkES: A component model for secure microkernel-based embedded systems Journal of Systems and Software Special Edition on Component-Based Software Engineering of Trustworthy Embedded Systems, Volume 80, Number 5, pp. 687–699, May, 2007 Preprint
		Nicholas FitzRoy-Dale A declarative approach to extensible interface compilation Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Microkernels for Embedded Systems (MIKES), Sydney, Australia, January, 2007

Contact

For more information about the project please contact Ihor (ihor.kuz at nicta.com.au).