Modules Design of the Hot-Swappable Embedded System

Abstract

Nowadays there are prevailing products from embedded systems. They cover so many facilities in our living environment such as cellular phones which we carry all day long, the internet phone, the mobile GPS, video players and TV game players. Among those facilities, their function of software updating is not so easy and automatic. Plus, when people think a product as a commodity, they think it is consumable. This character of short life-cycle pushes vendors to shorten their development period. If an embedded system can be hot-swapped remotely, it will in some degree satisfy vendors as well as users, because vendors can update their products after delivery whenever potential bugs revealed or additional functions developed, and therefore users gain the benefits of stability and selectable of software modules. In this paper, we propose an on-line hot-swap system architecture. We modulize all the software including system software and applications in our prototype, called HS2. The functions of on-line configuration are supported on a remote configuration PC running HS-Console. Users use the visual interface provided by the HS-Console to manipulate the operations such as updating, adding, deleting and migrating modules. With the features, embedded systems not only have the advantages of dynamic maintenance, software reuse and optimized efficiency, but also load balance and fault tolerance when we deploy a group of embedded systems to work together and dynamically dispatch or retreat software modules to the right system in the right time. The overall processing power and memory resource are therefore optimized. Software modules are kernel modules and application modules, while the two are treated no differences in HS2. We will describe, in this paper, the design philosophy of HS2, and then explain each module by focusing the working mechanism and the specialties it have.