Porting the Bound-T WCET tool to Lego Mindstorms and the Asterix RTOS

Static Worst Case Execution Time (WCET) analysis is a technique that computes an upper bound of the execution time of a program before runtime. Static WCET analysis has a potential to cut costs and save time in the development of real-time systems. These are systems that do not just demands a correct result, but also demands correct timing. However, static WCET analysis has not yet reached the industry in large scale. Measuring the WCET is the most common method to use, although it can not guarantee to find the WCET. The main goal of this thesis work was to bring static WCET analysis into the education of new real-time systems developers, thereby making them aware of the benefits of WCET analysis tools. Bound-T is a commercially available static WCET-analysis tool. Asterix is a laboratory framework made for education purposes, including a real-time operating system (RTOS) and a development environment. The target system used to visualize the work for the students is the Lego Mindstorms development kit, which includes a Renesas H8/300 processor. This thesis describes how we ported the Bound-T WCET tool to the Lego Mindstorms and the H8/300 processor. It also describes how we used the resulting Bound-T version to analyze and derive timing bounds for selected parts of the Asterix OS. The resulting Bound-T tool version will be used in real-time courses given at the Department of Computer Science and Electronics at Mälardalen University.