Re: [avr-gcc-list] multi-tasking source for education?

[Ned Konz]

On Wednesday 28 April 2004 9:28 pm, Douglas Dotson wrote:
>  > various FSM tasks based upon flags (semaphores) or
> > queue entries.
>
> flags == semaphores ?? I don't think so!

I didn't say that, Larry did. I'm well aware of the difference, and I suspect 
that he is too.

> I do agree that preemptive is a lot trickier
> than cooperative scheduling to debug. At least
> until the system scales up.

Even when the system scales up, the use of higher-level concepts like 
hierarchical state machines (with queues and monitors where required inside 
the HSM implementations) will be far easier and less trouble prone than more 
primitive abstractions like independent tasks and semaphores. If you design 
your system correctly, each state machine can operate as a separate 
RTOS-level preemptive task, while still providing the debugging and 
understandability benefits of a cooperative system. By avoiding shared 
resources completely (or burying them in state machine support code like the 
plumbing for event queues), you don't have to worry about deadlock, priority 
inversion, etc.

Big systems that expose semaphores directly may be designed at the wrong 
level. Semaphores are primitive building blocks for more advanced concurrency 
support, and shouldn't be exposed directly to the programmers of the 
application code, if at all possible.

-- 
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com
GPG key ID: BEEA7EFE