MPU-based incremental checkpointing for transiently-powered systems

Abstract

Transiently-powered devices are a class of small devices powered by energy harvesting. Because such devices are subject to frequent power outages, many recent works propose to checkpoint data residing in volatile RAM into non-volatile RAM. In this article, we propose a new incremental checkpointing mechanism supported by a common hardware component, namely a Memory Protection Unit (MPU). This mechanism leverages the hardware interrupts of the MPU: volatile RAM is read-only on boot and is progressively unlocked as soon as protection violations occur. The MPU interrupt handler is designed to flag the corresponding volatile RAM blocks as dirty, $i.e$., modified. When a power outage is foreseen to be imminent, the software simply has to copy the dirty blocks from volatile RAM into the non-volatile RAM to ensure application progress over power outages. We validate our approach analytically and in cycle-accurate simulation, and we show that the proposed solution can be easily implemented on real hardware.