On the consolidation of mixed criticalities applications on multicore architectures

Abstract

In this paper we propose a hybrid solution to ensure results correctness when deploying several applications with different safety requirements on a single multi-core-based system. The proposed solution is based on lightweight hardware redundancy, implemented using smart watchdogs and voter logic, combined with software redundancy. Two techniques of software redundancy are used: the first one is software temporal triple modular redundancy, used for those tasks with low criticality and no real-time requirement. The second software redundancy technique is triple module redundancy for tasks with high criticality and real-time requirements, assisted by a hardware voter. A hypervisor is used to separate each task in the system in an independent resource partition, thus ensuring that no functional interference is occurring. The proposed solution has been evaluated through hardware and software fault injection on two hardware platforms, featuring a dual-core processor and a quad-core processor respectively. Results show a high fault tolerance achieved using the proposed architecture.