Monitoring Framework to Support Mixed-Criticality Applications on Multicore Platforms

Abstract

The automotive industry is looking into integrated architecture to combine multiple application subsystems of different criticalities on the readily available low-cost multicore platforms as they promise several benefits. However, it is difficult to achieve the required isolation and guarantees in such an architecture due to contention in shared resources, e.g., CPU, shared-bus, and memory (controller). This can cause unpredictable delays leading to deadline misses in real-time applications. We propose a low overhead modular monitoring framework to provide support for ensuring that the real-time applications meet their deadline when considering shared resource accesses, and helping to improve resource utilization so that best-effort applications can achieve a better Quality-of-Service despite pessimistic resource allocation assumptions of real-time applications. Our framework keeps the monitoring overheads to a minimum and triggered reaction meaningful by operating on the basis of low-level hardware and software signals, strategically checking resources, and triggering actions based on abstract availability of resources. We propose a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) to relieve the system designers from the tedious and error-prone job of configuring platform-specific parameters for the framework. Finally, this paper evaluates our monitoring framework based on an instantiation on a Xilinx Zynq UltraSacle multicore SoC running Linux and a simple industry-inspired use case.