Cooperatively multitasking in an interrupt free computing environment
View Patent ↗Multitasking in a hardware interrupt free environment. Event indicators are employed to multitask between processes of the environment. Processes to be multitasked register with one another, and then during processing, one of the processes toggles an event indicator to allow another process to execute. The toggling allows the processes to share resources in an interrupt free environment.
1. A method of multitasking processes comprising:
employing a single threaded computer processor to multitask multiple processes, the single threaded computer processor being a hardware interrupt free computer processor, wherein the employing comprises:
initiating executing of a first process using the single threaded computer processor;
multitasking the first process with a second process using the single threaded computer processor, wherein the multitasking comprises setting and employing one or more event indicators created by at least one of the first or second processes; and
wherein before completion of execution of the first process, the first process is saved in memory of the single threaded computer processor to allow for execution of the second process, wherein the first process remains active in memory to preserve the first process' state, and wherein the employing one or more event indicators comprises toggling at least one event indicator of the one or more event indicators to indicate which process of the first process and the second process is to execute.
2. The method of claim 1 , further comprising:
creating a first event indicator of the one or more event indicators by the first process;
creating a second event indicator of the one or more event indicators by the second process; and
toggling between the first event indicator and the second event indicator to multitask the first process and the second process.
3. The method of claim 2 , wherein a setting of the first event indicator allows the first process to execute.
4. The method of claim 2 , wherein a setting of the second event indicator allows the second process to execute.
5. The method of claim 1 , further comprising dynamically registering the second process with the first process at initialization of the second process.
6. The method of claim 5 , wherein the registering comprises:
providing to the first process an indication of a location of an event indicator created by the second process; and
providing to the second process an indication of a location of an event indicator created by the first process.
7. The method of claim 1 , wherein at least one of the first process and the second process is an executive process.
8. The method of claim 7 , wherein the other process of the first process and the second process is a spawned process, the spawning of which is facilitated by the executive process, in response to an event indicator of the one or more event indicators, and wherein the executive process has a higher priority than the spawned process.
9. The method of claim 1 , wherein the first process and the second process are cooperative processes.