2,609 research outputs found
Restart-Based Fault-Tolerance: System Design and Schedulability Analysis
Embedded systems in safety-critical environments are continuously required to
deliver more performance and functionality, while expected to provide verified
safety guarantees. Nonetheless, platform-wide software verification (required
for safety) is often expensive. Therefore, design methods that enable
utilization of components such as real-time operating systems (RTOS), without
requiring their correctness to guarantee safety, is necessary.
In this paper, we propose a design approach to deploy safe-by-design embedded
systems. To attain this goal, we rely on a small core of verified software to
handle faults in applications and RTOS and recover from them while ensuring
that timing constraints of safety-critical tasks are always satisfied. Faults
are detected by monitoring the application timing and fault-recovery is
achieved via full platform restart and software reload, enabled by the short
restart time of embedded systems. Schedulability analysis is used to ensure
that the timing constraints of critical plant control tasks are always
satisfied in spite of faults and consequent restarts. We derive schedulability
results for four restart-tolerant task models. We use a simulator to evaluate
and compare the performance of the considered scheduling models
On the periodic behavior of real-time schedulers on identical multiprocessor platforms
This paper is proposing a general periodicity result concerning any
deterministic and memoryless scheduling algorithm (including
non-work-conserving algorithms), for any context, on identical multiprocessor
platforms. By context we mean the hardware architecture (uniprocessor,
multicore), as well as task constraints like critical sections, precedence
constraints, self-suspension, etc. Since the result is based only on the
releases and deadlines, it is independent from any other parameter. Note that
we do not claim that the given interval is minimal, but it is an upper bound
for any cycle of any feasible schedule provided by any deterministic and
memoryless scheduler
Parametric Schedulability Analysis of Fixed Priority Real-Time Distributed Systems
Parametric analysis is a powerful tool for designing modern embedded systems,
because it permits to explore the space of design parameters, and to check the
robustness of the system with respect to variations of some uncontrollable
variable. In this paper, we address the problem of parametric schedulability
analysis of distributed real-time systems scheduled by fixed priority. In
particular, we propose two different approaches to parametric analysis: the
first one is a novel technique based on classical schedulability analysis,
whereas the second approach is based on model checking of Parametric Timed
Automata (PTA).
The proposed analytic method extends existing sensitivity analysis for single
processors to the case of a distributed system, supporting preemptive and
non-preemptive scheduling, jitters and unconstrained deadlines. Parametric
Timed Automata are used to model all possible behaviours of a distributed
system, and therefore it is a necessary and sufficient analysis. Both
techniques have been implemented in two software tools, and they have been
compared with classical holistic analysis on two meaningful test cases. The
results show that the analytic method provides results similar to classical
holistic analysis in a very efficient way, whereas the PTA approach is slower
but covers the entire space of solutions.Comment: Submitted to ECRTS 2013 (http://ecrts.eit.uni-kl.de/ecrts13
A Novel Side-Channel in Real-Time Schedulers
We demonstrate the presence of a novel scheduler side-channel in preemptive,
fixed-priority real-time systems (RTS); examples of such systems can be found
in automotive systems, avionic systems, power plants and industrial control
systems among others. This side-channel can leak important timing information
such as the future arrival times of real-time tasks.This information can then
be used to launch devastating attacks, two of which are demonstrated here (on
real hardware platforms). Note that it is not easy to capture this timing
information due to runtime variations in the schedules, the presence of
multiple other tasks in the system and the typical constraints (e.g.,
deadlines) in the design of RTS. Our ScheduLeak algorithms demonstrate how to
effectively exploit this side-channel. A complete implementation is presented
on real operating systems (in Real-time Linux and FreeRTOS). Timing information
leaked by ScheduLeak can significantly aid other, more advanced, attacks in
better accomplishing their goals
Schedulability analysis of timed CSP models using the PAT model checker
Timed CSP can be used to model and analyse real-time and concurrent behaviour of embedded control systems. Practical CSP implementations combine the CSP model of a real-time control system with prioritized scheduling to achieve efficient and orderly use of limited resources. Schedulability analysis of a timed CSP model of a system with respect to a scheduling scheme and a particular execution platform is important to ensure that the system design satisfies its timing requirements. In this paper, we propose a framework to analyse schedulability of CSP-based designs for non-preemptive fixed-priority multiprocessor scheduling. The framework is based on the PAT model checker and the analysis is done with dense-time model checking on timed CSP models. We also provide a schedulability analysis workflow to construct and analyse, using the proposed framework, a timed CSP model with scheduling from an initial untimed CSP model without scheduling. We demonstrate our schedulability analysis workflow on a case study of control software design for a mobile robot. The proposed approach provides non-pessimistic schedulability results
Flexible Scheduling in Multimedia Kernels: an Overview
Current Hard Real-Time (HRT) kernels have their timely behaviour guaranteed on the cost of a rather restrictive use of the available resources. This makes current HRT scheduling techniques inadequate for use in a multimedia environment where we can make a considerable profit by a better and more flexible use of the resources. We will show that we can improve the flexibility and efficiency of multimedia kernels. Therefore we introduce Real Time Transactions (RTT) with Deadline Inheritance policies for a small class of scheduling algorithms and we will evaluate these algorithms for use in a multimedia environmen
Gang FTP scheduling of periodic and parallel rigid real-time tasks
In this paper we consider the scheduling of periodic and parallel rigid
tasks. We provide (and prove correct) an exact schedulability test for Fixed
Task Priority (FTP) Gang scheduler sub-classes: Parallelism Monotonic, Idling,
Limited Gang, and Limited Slack Reclaiming. Additionally, we study the
predictability of our schedulers: we show that Gang FJP schedulers are not
predictable and we identify several sub-classes which are actually predictable.
Moreover, we extend the definition of rigid, moldable and malleable jobs to
recurrent tasks
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