A Reliable and Predictable Scratchpad-centric OS for Multi-core Embedded Systems

The reliable use of multi-core platforms for designing safety-critical systems still represents an open challenge. Recently, the FAA [1] has formally expressed its concern towards the use of multi-core systems in avionics. The sharing of hardware resources introduces non-trivial timing dependencies between logically independent components (e.g. cores); additionally, the increase in size of circuitry, memory resources, and transistor density makes these platforms more susceptible to transient memory (soft) errors. This work addresses the problem of memory soft errors and their recovery at an OS/platform level on commercial multi-core systems. Proposed strategy considers the schedulability impact of recovery procedures on hard real-time workloads. Finally, the implementation of a SPM-centric OS with the proposed OS-level strategies was performed by using a commercially available multi-core platform. The design has been validated and evaluated using a combination of synthetic and realistic (EEMBC) benchmarks.