Certifiable Memory Management System for Safety Critical Partitioned System

Alexy Torres Aurora Dugo (1) , Jean-Baptiste Lefoul (1) , Serge Harnois (2) , Felipe Gohring de Magalhaes (1) , Gabriela Nicolescu (1)

1 EPM - École Polytechnique de Montréal
2 MSS - MANNARINO Systems & Software

Aerospace systems are safety-critical systems that need to respect tight constraints in terms of execution time, resource usage and predictability. This industry is currently transitioning from predictable single-core processors to less predictable multicore architectures. This transition reveals multiple challenges due to interferences. The contention of different cores on shared resources introduces interferences. This phenomenon prevents the required isolation between applications and the estimation of their worst-case execution time. To prevent interferences and ease the certification of robust partitioned multi-core systems, guidance documents, such as the CAST-32A, provide objectives on resource isolation and management. In this paper, we propose a memory manager to mitigate memory interferences generated in shared cache, main memory and memory bus. Our results show an increase in timing predictability by 68.1%. Aside the memory manager, based on our results, we provide a set of recommendations to assist system integrators' decisions and ease the certification process by conforming to the current guidance.

Keywords: Aerospace; ARINC-653; Certification; Critical systems; Interference; Resource management; RTOS

Domains: Hardware Architecture [cs.AR]; Embedded Systems; Operating Systems [cs.OS]

Alexy Torres Aurora Dugo, Jean-Baptiste Lefoul, Serge Harnois, Felipe Gohring de Magalhaes, Gabriela Nicolescu. Certifiable Memory Management System for Safety Critical Partitioned System. ERTS2022, Jun 2022, Toulouse, France. ⟨hal-03697093⟩