Propagation of best practice for multicore interference analysis between aerospace and automotive domains
Dr. Antoine Colin
Chief Technology Officer, Rapita Systems
For high-integrity systems utilising multicore processors, multicore interference is a well-known and challenging problem: competition for shared processor resources can allow notionally independent software executing on different cores to have a very large impact on the execution time behaviour of each other. Partitioning mechanisms can be deployed to mitigate this interference. Some of these may be implemented by configuring the hardware in a certain way, others rely upon operating system or hypervisor mechanisms, and yet others may rely upon the architecture of the operational software itself.
Whenever a partitioning mechanism is used for the mitigation of an interference channel, it is necessary to demonstrate that the mechanism is effective; if the mechanism cannot be demonstrated to be effective, then the interference channel cannot be assumed to be mitigated. We demonstrate how a combination of timing measurements, resource usage measurements, and carefully-crafted interference-generation code can be used to provide robust on-target evidence that an interference channel has been effectively mitigated by a partitioning mechanism.
About Dr. Antoine Colin
Dr Antoine Colin is a founder of Rapita Systems Ltd and leads the team in charge of the development of all the hardware and software product lines of the company, and the engineering services team in charge of delivering solutions to customers. He is the software architect for the RVS software platform and has been the main developer for a large part of its key technologies. His expertise lies in on-target analysis for safety critical and real-time systems (timing analysis, structural coverage, constraints checking, etc.) and he has been involved in several research projects ranging from simulation of cryptographic processors, analysis of the impact of modern CPU architecture for space applications, to automatic code transformation for fault detection.
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