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 and affinities, 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.
Project home:
Git:
- https://github.com/siemens/embb.git (HTTP)
- [email protected]:siemens/embb.git (SSH)
Mailing lists:
- [email protected] (announcements)
- [email protected] (development)
Subscription:
- https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/embb-announcements/join
- https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/embb-dev/join
Contact:
See the file "COPYING.md" in the project's root directory.
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 12.04) / 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: [email protected].
EMB² consists 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 and mtapi_plugins_c (mtapi_network_c and mtapi_opencl_c)
- tasks: tasks_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 functions. Component mtapi_c is a task scheduler written in C and mtapi_cpp a C++ wrapper for the scheduler (mtapi_network_c and mtapi_opencl_c are scheduler plugins for distributed and OpenCL-based heterogeneous systems, respectively). To simplify programming of homogeneous systems, tasks_cpp contains abstractions to the MTAPI interfaces. Component algorithms_cpp provides high-level constructs for typical parallelization tasks in C++, and dataflow_cpp generic skeletons for the development of parallel stream-based applications. Finally, containers_cpp provides data structures for storing objects in a thread-safe way.
Note: It is recommended to build from a release file and not from a repository snapshot in order to get the documentation and the examples out-of-the box. The release files can be found at https://github.com/siemens/embb/releases.
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.
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 <generator> .. [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. For example, to use Clang on Linux use:
cmake .. -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=clang++ -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=clang
In the same way you may cross compile to another platform. For example, to cross compile to ARM Linux using GCC, you need to specify the cross compiler itself and the target architecture as an argument to the compiler:
cmake .. -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=arm-linux-gnueabi-gcc++
-DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS=-march=armv7-a
-DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=arm-linux-gnueabi-gcc
-DCMAKE_C_FLAGS=-march=armv7-a
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.
Similarly, automatic initialization of the task scheduler by the MTAPI C++ interface can be disabled with -DUSE_AUTOMATIC_INITIALIZATION=OFF. This way, unexpected delays after startup can be avoided, e.g. for timing measurements.
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 default Linux build without automatic MTAPI C++ initialization, type
cmake .. -DUSE_AUTOMATIC_INITIALIZATION=OFF
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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_dataflow_cpp, embb_algorithms_cpp, embb_containers_cpp,
embb_mtapi_cpp, embb_mtapi_c, embb_base_cpp, embb_base_c
The C++ header files can be included as follows:
#include<embb/mtapi/mtapi.h>
#include<embb/base/base.h>
#include<embb/containers/containers.h>
#include<embb/dataflow/dataflow.h>
The following libraries have to be linked in the given order:
embb_mtapi_c, embb_base_c
The C header files can be included as follows:
#include<embb/mtapi/c/mtapi.h> or #include<mtapi.h>
#include<embb/base/c/base.h>
The release files of EMB² come with a tutorial, example programs, and a reference manual (HTML) describing the APIs. All documentation is contained in the "doc" folder. The root document of the HTML reference is "doc/reference/index.html". Note that generated documentation files are not under version control and hence not contained in the repository. As mentioned above, it is therefore recommended to download one of the packaged release files in order to have ready-to-use documentation.
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++.
- 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).
- While MTAPI fully supports heterogeneous systems, the algorithms and dataflow components are currently limited to homogeneous systems.
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.
EMB² is supposed to be easily portable to platforms unsupported so far. Almost all platform specific code is located in the base_c and base_cpp modules. All existing platform specific code is fenced by EMBB_PLATFORM_* defines.
To distinguish between compilers, EMB² currently uses the following defines:
- EMBB_PLATFORM_COMPILER_GNUC
- EMBB_PLATFORM_COMPILER_MSVC
- EMBB_PLATFORM_COMPILER_UNKNOWN
Different architectures are distinguished using:
- EMBB_PLATFORM_ARCH_X86
- EMBB_PLATFORM_ARCH_X86_32
- EMBB_PLATFORM_ARCH_X86_64
- EMBB_PLATFORM_ARCH_ARM
- EMBB_PLATFORM_ARCH_UNKNOWN
Threading APIs are switched by:
- EMBB_PLATFORM_THREADING_WINTHREADS
- EMBB_PLATFORM_THREADING_POSIXTHREADS
Please use these defines for new platform specific code. If additional defines are needed, they can be defined in the config.h or cmake_config.h.in files.
- The MTAPI C++ interface supports automatic initialization, which allows for easy usage of the MTAPI C++, Algorithms, and Dataflow components. For performance measurements, explicit initialization is strongly recommended since the measurements will otherwise include the initialization time of MTAPI.
- 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/