OSGi On An Arm9 Microcontroller

Oct. 4, 2010

ProSyst mBS OSGi can target small platforms like an Arm9 microcontroller

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ProSyst OSGi mBS SDK

ProSyst demonstrated their ProSyst mBS OSGi R.4.2 certfied implementation on an unnamed 156 MHz ARM9 microcontroller (see The World’s smallest OSGi Solution). The platform had 16 Mbytes of SRAM and only 32 Mbytes of flash memory. The micro and chipset used only 450mW when active 25 mW in sleep mode.

The system runs on an RTOS and IBM's J9 virtual machine. It contains a complete implementation of OSGi Alliance's OSGi framework. The run time utilizes 1.14 Mybtes of RAM while the OSGi framework required 765 Kbytes of flash memory. Start up time for the system was only 4.3 seconds. Once loaded, the framework goes into idle allowing the application to take advantage of the processor until it needs to utilize OSGi services.

The ProSyst mBS OSGi includes the following services:

Software Admin – for download and installation of software packages
Network Manager – for reading and changing LAN and WAN network settings
Firewall Manager - for changing the firewall settings
Object Database Mapper – for providing interfaces to object and relational data bases
Serial Bundle – provides OSGi API for accessing the serial port
USB Bundle – provideds OSGi API for USB
SL/TLS support for the OSGi Runtime
Web Services Bundle – allows to export OSGi bundels as web services and to access web services through OSGi services
Management Components – support for remote device management (e.g. OMA DM, TR-69) and content downloading

Developers can take advantage of ProSyst's mBS SDK The SDK (Fig. 1) consists of 3 parts:

Eclipse Plugins for the development of OSGi apps and services
OSGi Runtime
OSGi Test & Validation Environment

OSGi is used as the basis of the Everyware Software Framework (ESF) from Eurotech.

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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