Watchcop - a hardware/software co-design approach for safe software execution

This paper introduces a novel approach to support runtime execution monitoring with nearly no negative impact on runtime. The monitoring is configurable to application-specific requirements and supports real-time behavior during development and runtime. An extension of the basic approach for monitoring contains watchdog capabilities for a fine-grained observation of runtime activities and a two-level support of recovery from program failures. It is shown how these capabilities may be used to ensure safe software execution.