Fine-grained timing and control flow error checking for hard real-time task execution

Robustness and reliability are essential requirements of today's embedded systems. Especially errors in the control flow of a program, e.g. caused by transient errors, may lead to a faulty system behavior potentially with catastrophic consequences. Several methods for control flow checking have been proposed during the last decades. However, these techniques mostly focus on a correct sequence of application parts but not on the correct timing behavior of the control flow, which is essential for hard real-time systems. In this paper, we present a new approach which introduces fine-grained on-line timing checks for hard real-time systems combined with a lightweight control flow monitoring technique. The proposed approach is a hybrid hardware-software technique: We instrument the application code at compile-time by adding checkpoints, which contain temporal and logical information of the control flow. During run-time, a small hardware check unit connected to the core reads the instrumented data in order to verify the correctness of the application's control flow and timing behavior. The finegrained functionality of our mechanism allows a detection of many transient errors, associated with very low detection latency. It is no longer necessary to redundantly execute code in order to monitor anomalies. The hardware overhead is limited to a small check unit (only 0.5 % of chip space compared to the processor core); according to experimental results, the execution time overhead is only 10.6 % in the average case while the memory overhead is 12.3 %.