Embedded Multicore Building Blocks (EMB²) ========================================= Overview -------- The Embedded Multicore Building Blocks (EMB²) are an easy to use yet powerful and efficient C/C++ library for the development of parallel applications. EMB² has been specifically designed for embedded systems and the typical requirements that accompany them, such as real-time capability and constraints on memory consumption. As a major advantage, low-level operations are hidden in the library which relieves software developers from the burden of thread management and synchronization. This not only improves productivity of parallel software development, but also results in increased reliability and performance of the applications. EMB² is independent of the hardware architecture (x86, ARM, ...) and runs on various platforms, from small devices to large systems containing numerous processor cores. It builds on MTAPI, a standardized programming interface for leveraging task parallelism in embedded systems containing symmetric or asymmetric multicore processors. A core feature of MTAPI is low-overhead scheduling of fine-grained tasks among the available cores during runtime. Unlike existing libraries, EMB² supports task priorities, which allows the creation of soft real-time systems. Additionally, the scheduling strategy can be optimized for non-functional requirements such as minimal latency and fairness. Besides the task scheduler, EMB² provides basic parallel algorithms, concurrent data structures, and skeletons for implementing stream processing applications (see figure below). These building blocks are largely implemented in a non-blocking fashion, thus preventing frequently encountered pitfalls like lock contention, deadlocks, and priority inversion. As another advantage in real-time systems, the algorithms and data structures give certain progress guarantees. For example, wait-free data structures guarantee system-wide progress which means that every operation completes within a finite number of steps independently of any other concurrent operations on the same data structure. Building blocks of EMB² Community and Contact --------------------- Project home: - https://github.com/siemens/embb Git: - https://github.com/siemens/embb.git (HTTP) - git@github.com:siemens/embb.git (SSH) Mailing lists: - embb-announcements@googlegroups.com (announcements) - embb-dev@googlegroups.com (development) Subscription: - https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/embb-announcements/join - https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/embb-dev/join Contact: - embb.info@gmail.com or - tobias.schuele@siemens.com License ------- See the file "COPYING.md" in the project's root directory. Requirements ------------ This project is based on the standards C99 (for C code) and C++03 (for C++ code) to be usable on a wide range of target systems. It has been tested on the following OS/compiler/architecture combinations: - Linux (Ubuntu 12.10) / GCC 4.8.1 / x86, x86_64 - Linux (Ubuntu 12.04) / Clang 3.0.0 / x86_64 - Linux (Ubuntu 14.04) / GCC 4.8.2 / ARMv7 - Windows * MSVC 12.0.21005.1 REL / x86, x86_64 * MSVC 11.0.50727.42 VSLRSTAGE / x86, x86_64 Other compilers and operating systems may be supported without any changes to the source code. The project includes unit tests that can be used to find out whether a system not officially supported is suitable to run EMB². If there is a requirement to support a system on which the unit tests do not pass, please contact us: embb-dev@googlegroups.com. Directory Structure ------------------- EMB² is a technology stack consisting of various building blocks. For some of them, there exist C and C++ versions, others are only implemented in C++. The directory names are postfixed with either "_cpp" or "_c" for the C++ and C versions, respectively. Currently, EMB² contains the following components: - base: base_c, base_cpp - mtapi: mtapi_c, mtapi_cpp - algorithms: algorithms_cpp - dataflow: dataflow_cpp - containers: containers_cpp Each component consists of an include, a src, and a test subfolder that contain the header files, source files, and unit tests, respectively. Component base_c contains abstractions for threading, synchronization, atomic operations, and other functionalities. As the name indicates, the code is implemented in C. Component base_cpp is mainly a C++ wrapper around the base_c functionalities. Component mtapi_c is a task scheduler written in C and mtapi_cpp a C++ wrapper for the scheduler. Component algorithms_cpp provides high-level constructs for typical parallelization task in C++, and dataflow_cpp generic skeletons for the development of parallel stream-based applications. Finally, component containers_cpp provides containers, i.e., data structures for storing object in an organized and thread-safe way. Build and Installation ---------------------- Note: It is recommended to build from a packaged release file and not from a snapshot of the repository in order to get the documentation and the examples out-of-the box. EMB² is built using CMake (version 2.8.9 or higher). CMake is a build file generator which allows to abstract from the concrete build tools. To generate and invoke the platform-specific build files, open a shell (on Windows, use the Visual Studio developer shell to have the correct environment variables) and change to the project's root directory. Create a subdirectory, where you want to build the library, e.g., "build". Change to that subdirectory. It is assumed that the project's root directory is now the parent directory. ### 1. Generation of native build files Choose an appropriate build file generator for your system. - For Linux, GCC/Clang, x86/x86_64/ARM: "Unix Makefiles" - For Windows, MSVC of VS 2013, x86: "Visual Studio 12" - For Windows, MSVC of VS 2013, x86_64: "Visual Studio 12 Win64" - For Windows, MSVC of VS 2012, x86: "Visual Studio 11" - For Windows, MSVC of VS 2012, x86_64: "Visual Studio 11 Win64" A list of all available generators can be displayed by typing "cmake" without any options. The build files can be generated using the following command: cmake -G .. [OPTIONS] Note that on Linux, the architecture (32/64 bit) cannot be selected by the generator. However, the build mode (Release/Debug) can be specified using the option -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=[Release|Debug]. If no build mode is given on Linux, the default (Release) is used. The Visual Studio generators create build files for both modes (the selection is done at build time). You may choose a custom compiler instead the default one by defining CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER and/or CMAKE_C_COMPILER. E.g. to use clang on Linux use: cmake .. -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=clang++ -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=clang EMB² can be built with and without C++ exception handling, which has to be specified on build file generation. When exceptions are turned off, an error message is emitted and the program aborts in case of an exception within EMB². To disable exceptions, add the option -DUSE_EXCEPTIONS=OFF. The tutorial of EMB² comes with example source files in doc/examples/. These can be built with the other source files using CMake option -DBUILD_EXAMPLES=ON in the generation step. Note, however, that the examples use C++11 features and require a corresponding compiler. Now you can generate the build files as shown by the following examples. For a Linux Debug build with exception handling, type cmake -G "Unix Makefiles" .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug For a Windows build (VS 2013, x86) without exception handling, type cmake -G "Visual Studio 12" .. -DUSE_EXCEPTIONS=OFF Note that "Visual Studio 12" refers to the version number of Visual Studio and not to the year in which it was released (2013). ### 2. Compiling and linking As the next step, you can compile the library using the generated build files. On Linux, the build mode (Release|Debug) is already given in the build files, whereas on Windows, it has to be specified now. For a Linux build, type cmake --build . For a Windows Release build, type cmake --build . --config Release ### 3. Running the tests To check whether EMB² was compiled correctly, run the tests. The test executables are contained in the subfolder "binaries". On Linux, type binaries/run_tests.sh On Windows, type binaries\run_tests.bat If no error message occurs, EMB² is working fine. ### 4. Installation The default installation path on Linux is /usr/local/ and on Windows C:\Program Files\embb-X.Y.Z\ or C:\Program Files (x86)\embb-X.Y.Z depending on the target architecture. If you want a different installation path, you can change it now by typing cmake -DINSTALL_PREFIX=YourCustomPath .. The option "-DINSTALL_PREFIX=YourCustomPath" can also be given in Step 1. To install the files, use the command cmake --build . --target install which copies the contents of the "install" folder to the "bin", "lib", and "include" folders in the installation path. For the default paths, the installation has to be run with administrator / root privileges. Using the Library ----------------- To use EMB², the include files have to be made available during compilation of your application and the libraries have to be added during linking. ### 1. Using C++ If you want to use the C++ functionalities of EMB², you have to link the following libraries (names will be different on Windows and on Linux) in the given order: embb_base, embb_base_cpp, embb_mtapi_c, embb_mtapi_cpp, embb_containers_cpp, embb_algorithms_cpp, embb_dataflow_cpp The C++ header files can be included as follows: #include #include #include #include ### 2. Using C The following libraries have to be linked in the given order: embb_base_c, mtapi_c The C header files can be included as follows: #include or #include #include Documentation ------------- EMB² comes with a tutorial, example programs, and an HTML reference documentation describing the APIs, which can be found in the "doc" folder. The root document of the HTML reference is "doc/reference/index.html". Code Quality ------------ For the C++ parts of EMB², we respect most rules of the "Google C++ Style Guide" which are checked using the cpplint tool. However, we ignore some rules, as they are not applicable or yield false results for this project. For example, we respect the include order of the Google Style Guide, but use <> instead of "" for project includes, which confuses the cpplint tool. Moreover, we do not tolerate compiler warnings and regularly check the source code using Cppcheck, a static analysis tool for C++. Known Bugs and Limitations -------------------------- - The MTAPI implementation is currently limited to homogeneous systems. Support for heterogeneous systems will be added in the near future. - For memory management reasons, the number of threads EMB² can deal with is bounded by a predefined but modifiable constant (see functions embb_thread_get_max_count() / embb_thread_set_max_count() and class embb::base::Thread). Development and Contribution ---------------------------- The EMB² team welcomes all kinds of contributions, preferably as pull requests or patches via the development mailing lists (see above). If possible, please refer to a current snapshot of the development branch. Links ----- - Multicore Association: http://www.multicore-association.org - MTAPI: http://www.multicore-association.org/workgroup/mtapi.php - CMake: http://www.cmake.org/ - Google C++ Style Guide: http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.html - cpplint: http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cpplint/ - Cppcheck: http://cppcheck.sourceforge.net/