CARP: A Data Communication Mechanism for Multi-core Mixed-Criticality Systems

Abstract

We present CARP, a predictable and high-performance data communication mechanism for multi-core mixed-criticality systems (MCS). CARP is realized as a hardware cache coherence protocol that enables communication between critical and non-critical tasks while ensuring that non-critical tasks do not interfere with the safety requirements of critical tasks. The key novelty of CARP is that it is criticality-aware, and hence, handles communication patterns between critical and non-critical tasks appropriately. We derive the analytical worst-case latency bounds for requests using CARP and note that the observed per-request latencies are within the analytical worst-case latency bounds. We compare CARP against prior data communication mechanisms using synthetic and SPLASH-2 benchmarks. Our evaluation shows that CARP improves the average-case performance of MCS compared to prior data communication mechanisms, while maintaining the safety requirements of critical tasks.