Architecture of Graphics System with 3D Acceleration Support for Embedded Operating Systems

An increasing number of tasks now require the use of hardware accelerators to reduce the time required for computation and display the computational results. This paper presents a new graphics system architecture for operating systems (OSs) with microkernel architecture, including real-time OSs. The proposed system architecture provides capabilities for displaying graphical images on various information display devices and for accelerating graphical operations on GPU. The architecture of the graphics system uses a concept of allocators to manage system and video memory, provides an abstraction of memory operations with a single interface for video memory management, and simplifies memory handling where incorrect operation is the cause of many failures. A comparison between the performance of a real-time OS and Linux OS implementing the graphics system using the example of a glmark2 benchmark is presented, thereby the superiority of the proposed architecture in several scenarios is demonstrated.