Using Hardware Methods to Improve Time-predictable Performance in Real-time Java Systems


This paper describes hardware methods, a lightweight and
platform-independent scheme for linking real-time Java code
to co-processors implemented using a hardware description language
(HDL). Intended for use in embedded systems, hardware methods
have similar semantics to the native methods used to interface
Java code to legacy C/C++ software, but are also time-predictable,
facilitating accurate worst-case execution time (WCET) analysis.

By reference to several examples, the paper demonstrates the
applicability of hardware methods and shows that they can (1)
reduce the WCET of embedded real-time Java, and (2) improve
the quality of WCET estimates in the presence of infeasible paths.