
dsPIC is very well capable of multitasking under those circumstances.Ī semaphore, in computer science, is a protected variable (an entity storing a value) or abstract data type (an entity grouping several variables that may or may not be numerical) which constitutes the classic method for restricting access to shared resources, such as shared memory, in a multiprogramming environment (a system where several programs may be executing, or taking turns to execute, at once). Depending on the domain deadlines are often in the millisecond range meaning dsPIC is capable of executing tens of thousands of instructions. do the different tasks meet their specified deadlines. In a real time system it is important that it behaves in a temporal correct fashion, e.g. Generally the word multitasking is used regardless the number of cores present if the application uses some kind of a scheduler to give the impression multiple tasks are executed concurrently. The dsPIC cannot run true multitasking thus this meaning is not completely applicable.ĭsPIC, having a single core, can of course not run multiple tasks at the exact same time but this is true for every single core processor. It is no different than any other variable really.
COMPILING SEMAPHOR C SERIAL
You could also simply have a flag that says one piece of code has sent a byte on the serial port and has more bytes of the message which must be sent so no other code can use the serial port, you could generally call this a "semaphore" although it has no special implementation it's simply a global variable or a variable that was declared "static" someplace and passed the pointer around for other bits of code to reference. In the non-multitasking microcontroller context we sometimes use it to coordinate communications between the main code and ISRs and need to ask serious questions about what's actually going to come out of the compiler and what's going to happen on hardware (such as the read/write-coherency I mentioned above). The dsPIC cannot run true multitasking thus this meaning is not completely applicable. The term "semaphores" is often used in the context of multitasked processes. I'd say we can't really say unless you specify exactly what you want to do! If you want to preserve a variable's value when its context ends so it will have the same value next time you reenter the context, that is a static variable (which may or may not be used as a "semaphore"). If you are not even trying to communicate between different functions, then I'm not sure why you want to call this a "semaphore". Would doing what I suggested and never touching the actual value outside of the created functions to manipulate this value relieve this problem? If you're not accessing this variable from BOTH these contexts, you don't have any coherency problem even without volatile. Note that pthread.h as you mentioned (POSIX Thread) should be available by default with GCC, so simply including it in your C file will do that job, in case it's not available, a simple Google search should help.You both seem to agree that declaring the variable as volatile with the intention of telling the compiler not to make assumptions about its contents may lead to this happening anyway?Ĭorrect volatile will not guarantee coherency between access from main() or any tasks/functions called in main()'s call tree VERSUS accesses in ISRs or part of ISRs' call trees.


Where, switch -o is optional, but provided to mention name of Binary file which should be created out of your source. Now following is the syntax to compile your C source file, run following where your file is: gcc MyProgram.c -o MyProgram If you you see error like Fatal error: file not provided (not sure exact error message, but should be something similar), that means you have compiler ready.Īnd for editing your Code, you can use already available Gedit, just search for it in Dash. Then you can test if you have it installed by running gcc.
COMPILING SEMAPHOR C INSTALL
First thing you'll need in Ubuntu to compile C/C++ programs is installing GCC (Gnu Compiler Collection) which is part of build-essential package, do that by running: sudo apt-get install build-essential
