Acton is a real-time tasking executive for Ada applications. It implements the Ravenscar Profile and was design to implement and test the novel Cyclic Task language feature proposed in the PhD thesis Reducing the Cost of Real-Time Software through a Cyclic Task Abstraction for Ada by Pat Bernardi.
In addition to cyclic tasks, the executive takes the opportunity to explore different implementation ideas, including:
- Protected objects as a scheduling entity.
- Implementing schedulers as task-like entities (an interesting, flexible but inefficient idea).
- Active enforcement of task execution budgets.
- Support for priority servers for aperiodic tasks.
The project contains Acton and two helper tools:
- Acton Analyser: an ASIS tool that lists the tasks and protected objects contained within an application built on top of Acton and their properties.
- Oak Viewer: a command line tool that displays kernel trace data using the ARM Cortex-M ITM and DWT features.
A detailed description of the design and architecture of Acton can be found in Reducing the Cost of Real-Time Software through a Cyclic Task Abstraction for Ada
This project is not currently been developed.