Components and Capabilities
The key components, and the capabilities they provide, of the OpenAMP Framework include:
AMP Key Component |
Description |
|---|---|
remoteproc |
This component allows for the Life Cycle Management (LCM) of remote processors from software running on a host processor. The remoteproc API provided by the OpenAMP Framework is compliant with the remoteproc infrastructure present in upstream Linux 3.4.x kernel onward. |
RPMsg |
The RPMsg API enables Inter Processor Communications (IPC) between independent software contexts running on homogeneous or heterogeneous cores present in an AMP system. This API is compliant with the RPMsg bus infrastructure present in upstream Linux 3.4.x kernel onward. The Linux RPMsg bus and API infrastructure was first implemented by Texas Instruments |
Topologies
The following figure shows the various software environments/configurations supported by the OpenAMP Framework. As shown in this illustration, the OpenAMP Framework can be used with RTOS or bare metal contexts on a remote processor to communicate with Linux applications (in kernel space or user space) or other RTOS/bare metal-based applications running on the host processor through the remoteproc and RPMsg components.
The OpenAMP Framework also serves as a stand-alone library that enables RTOS and bare metal applications on a host processor to manage the life cycle of remote processor/firmware and communicate with them using RPMsg.
Proxy and RPC
In addition to providing a software framework/API for LCM and IPC, the OpenAMP Framework supplies a proxy infrastructure that provides a transparent interface to remote contexts from Linux user space applications running on the host processor. The proxy application hides all the logistics involved in bringing-up the remote software context and its shutdown sequence. In addition, it supports RPMsg-based Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs) from the remote context. A retargeting API available from the remote context allows C library system calls such as “_open”, “_close”, “_read”, and “_write” to be forwarded to the proxy application on the host for service.
Abstraction
In addition to the core capabilities, the OpenAMP Framework contains abstraction layers (porting layer) for migration to different software environments and new target processors/platforms, through its libmetal library.