Real time Java on resource-constrained platforms with Fiji VM

ABSTRACT

Real-time Java is quickly emerging as a platform for building safety-critical embedded systems. The real-time variants of Java, including [8, 15], are attractive alternatives to Ada and C since they provide a cleaner, simpler, and safer programming model. Unfortunately, current real-time Java implementations have trouble scaling down to very hard real-time embedded settings, where memory is scarce and processing power is limited. In this paper, we describe the architecture of the Fiji VM, which enables vanilla Java applications to run in very hard environments, including booting on bare hardware with only very rudimentary operating system support. We also show that our minimalistic approach delivers comparable performance to that of server-class production Java Virtual Machine implementations.

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