High Performance Real-Time Scheduling Framework for Multiprocessor Systems

Embedded systems, performing specific functions in modern devices, have become pervasive in today's technology landscape. As many of these systems are real-time systems, they necessitate operations with stringent time constraints. This is especially evident in sectors like automotive and aerospace. This thesis introduces a High Performance Real-time Scheduling (HPRTS) framework, which is designed to navigate the multifaceted challenges faced by multiprocessor real-time systems. To begin with, the research attempts to bridge the gap between system reliability and resource sharing in Mixed-Criticality Systems (MCS). In addressing this, a novel fault-tolerance solution is presented. Its main goal is to enhance fault management and reduce blocking time during fault tolerance. Following this, the thesis delves into task allocation in systems with shared resources. In this context, we introduce a distinct Resource Contention Model (RCM). Using this model as a foundation, our allocation strategy is formulated with the aim to reduce resource contention. Moreover, in light of the escalating system complexity where tasks are represented using Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) models, the research unveils a new Response Time Analysis (RTA) for multi-DAG systems. This particular analysis has been tailored to provide a safe and more refined bound. Reflecting on the contributions made, the achievements of the thesis highlight the potency of the HPRTS framework in steering real-time embedded systems toward high performance

Dependable Embedded Systems

This Open Access book introduces readers to many new techniques for enhancing and optimizing reliability in embedded systems, which have emerged particularly within the last five years. This book introduces the most prominent reliability concerns from today’s points of view and roughly recapitulates the progress in the community so far. Unlike other books that focus on a single abstraction level such circuit level or system level alone, the focus of this book is to deal with the different reliability challenges across different levels starting from the physical level all the way to the system level (cross-layer approaches). The book aims at demonstrating how new hardware/software co-design solution can be proposed to ef-fectively mitigate reliability degradation such as transistor aging, processor variation, temperature effects, soft errors, etc. Provides readers with latest insights into novel, cross-layer methods and models with respect to dependability of embedded systems; Describes cross-layer approaches that can leverage reliability through techniques that are pro-actively designed with respect to techniques at other layers; Explains run-time adaptation and concepts/means of self-organization, in order to achieve error resiliency in complex, future many core systems

Energy-Aware Real-Time Scheduling on Heterogeneous and Homogeneous Platforms in the Era of Parallel Computing

Multi-core processors increasingly appear as an enabling platform for embedded systems, e.g., mobile phones, tablets, computerized numerical controls, etc. The parallel task model, where a task can execute on multiple cores simultaneously, can efficiently exploit the multi-core platform\u27s computational ability. Many computation-intensive systems (e.g., self-driving cars) that demand stringent timing requirements often evolve in the form of parallel tasks. Several real-time embedded system applications demand predictable timing behavior and satisfy other system constraints, such as energy consumption. Motivated by the facts mentioned above, this thesis studies the approach to integrating the dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) policy with real-time embedded system application\u27s internal parallelism to reduce the worst-case energy consumption (WCEC), an essential requirement for energy-constrained systems. First, we propose an energy-sub-optimal scheduler, assuming the per-core speed tuning feature for each processor. Then we extend our solution to adapt the clustered multi-core platform, where at any given time, all the processors in the same cluster run at the same speed. We also present an analysis to exploit a task\u27s probabilistic information to improve the average-case energy consumption (ACEC), a common non-functional requirement of embedded systems. Due to the strict requirement of temporal correctness, the majority of the real-time system analysis considered the worst-case scenario, leading to resource over-provisioning and cost. The mixed-criticality (MC) framework was proposed to minimize energy consumption and resource over-provisioning. MC scheduling has received considerable attention from the real-time system research community, as it is crucial to designing safety-critical real-time systems. This thesis further addresses energy-aware scheduling of real-time tasks in an MC platform, where tasks with varying criticality levels (i.e., importance) are integrated into a common platform. We propose an algorithm GEDF-VD for scheduling MC tasks with internal parallelism in a multiprocessor platform. We also prove the correctness of GEDF-VD, provide a detailed quantitative evaluation, and reported extensive experimental results. Finally, we present an analysis to exploit a task\u27s probabilistic information at their respective criticality levels. Our proposed approach reduces the average-case energy consumption while satisfying the worst-case timing requirement

Mixed Criticality Systems - A Review : (13th Edition, February 2022)

This review covers research on the topic of mixed criticality systems that has been published since Vestal’s 2007 paper. It covers the period up to end of 2021. The review is organised into the following topics: introduction and motivation, models, single processor analysis (including job-based, hard and soft tasks, fixed priority and EDF scheduling, shared resources and static and synchronous scheduling), multiprocessor analysis, related topics, realistic models, formal treatments, systems issues, industrial practice and research beyond mixed-criticality. A list of PhDs awarded for research relating to mixed-criticality systems is also included

Modular Avionics Software Integration on Multi-Core COTS : certification-Compliant Methodology and Timing Analysis Metrics for Legacy Software Reuse in Modern Aerospace Systems

Interference in multicores is undesirable for hard real-time systems and especially in the aerospace industry, for which it is mandatory to ensure beforehand timing predictability and deadlines enforcement in a system runtime behavior, in order to be granted acceptance by certification authorities. The goal of this thesis is to propose an approach for multi-core integration of legacy IMA software, without any hardware nor software modification, and which complies as much as possible to current, incremental certification and IMA key concepts such as robust time and space partitioning. The motivations of this thesis are to stick as much as possible to the current IMA software integration process in order to maximize the chances of acceptation by avionics industries of the contributions of this thesis, but also because the current process has long been proven efficient on aerospace systems currently in usage. Another motivation is to minimize the extra effort needed to provide certification authorities with timing-related verification information required when seeking approval. As a secondary goal depending on the possibilities, the contributions should offer design optimization features, and help reduce the time-to-market by automating some steps of the design and verification process. This thesis proposes two complete methodologies for IMA integration on multi-core COTS. Each of them offers different advantages and has different drawbacks, and therefore each of them may correspond to its own, complementary situations. One fits all avionics and certification requirements of incremental verification and robust partitioning and therefore fits up to DAL A applications, while the other offers maximum Size, Weight and Power (SWaP) optimization and fits either up to DAL C applications, multipartition applications or non-IMA applications. The methodologies are said to be "complete" because this thesis provides all necessary metrics to go through all steps of the software integration process. More specifically, this includes, for each strategy: - a static timing analysis for safely upper-bounding inter-core interference, and deriving the corresponding WCET upper-bounds for each task. - a Constraint Programming (CP) formulation for automated software/hardware allocation; the resulting allocation is correct by construction since the CP process embraces the proposed timing analysis mentioned earlier. - a CP formulation for automated schedule generation; the resulting schedule is correct by construction since the CP process embraces the proposed timing analysis mentioned earlier

병렬 및 분산 임베디드 시스템을 위한 모델 기반 코드 생성 프레임워크

학위논문(박사)--서울대학교 대학원 :공과대학 컴퓨터공학부,2020. 2. 하순회.소프트웨어 설계 생산성 및 유지보수성을 향상시키기 위해 다양한 소프트웨어 개발 방법론이 제안되었지만, 대부분의 연구는 응용 소프트웨어를 하나의 프로세서에서 동작시키는 데에 초점을 맞추고 있다. 또한, 임베디드 시스템을 개발하는 데에 필요한 지연이나 자원 요구 사항에 대한 비기능적 요구 사항을 고려하지 않고 있기 때문에 일반적인 소프트웨어 개발 방법론을 임베디드 소프트웨어를 개발하는 데에 적용하는 것은 적합하지 않다. 이 논문에서는 병렬 및 분산 임베디드 시스템을 대상으로 하는 소프트웨어를 모델로 표현하고, 이를 소프트웨어 분석이나 개발에 활용하는 개발 방법론을 소개한다. 우리의 모델에서 응용 소프트웨어는 계층적으로 표현할 수 있는 여러 개의 태스크로 이루어져 있으며, 하드웨어 플랫폼과 독립적으로 명세한다. 태스크 간의 통신 및 동기화는 모델이 정의한 규약이 정해져 있고, 이러한 규약을 통해 실제 프로그램을 실행하기 전에 소프트웨어 에러를 정적 분석을 통해 확인할 수 있고, 이는 응용의 검증 복잡도를 줄이는 데에 기여한다. 지정한 하드웨어 플랫폼에서 동작하는 프로그램은 태스크들을 프로세서에 매핑한 이후에 자동적으로 합성할 수 있다. 위의 모델 기반 소프트웨어 개발 방법론에서 사용하는 프로그램 합성기를 본 논문에서 제안하였는데, 명세한 플랫폼 요구 사항을 바탕으로 병렬 및 분산 임베디드 시스템을에서 동작하는 코드를 생성한다. 여러 개의 정형적 모델들을 계층적으로 표현하여 응용의 동적 행태를 나타고, 합성기는 여러 모델로 구성된 계층적인 모델로부터 병렬성을 고려하여 태스크를 실행할 수 있다. 또한, 프로그램 합성기에서 다양한 플랫폼이나 네트워크를 지원할 수 있도록 코드를 관리하는 방법도 보여주고 있다. 본 논문에서 제시하는 소프트웨어 개발 방법론은 6개의 하드웨어 플랫폼과 3 종류의 네트워크로 구성되어 있는 실제 감시 소프트웨어 시스템 응용 예제와 이종 멀티 프로세서를 활용하는 원격 딥 러닝 예제를 수행하여 개발 방법론의 적용 가능성을 시험하였다. 또한, 프로그램 합성기가 새로운 플랫폼이나 네트워크를 지원하기 위해 필요로 하는 개발 비용도 실제 측정 및 예측하여 상대적으로 적은 노력으로 새로운 플랫폼을 지원할 수 있음을 확인하였다. 많은 임베디드 시스템에서 예상치 못한 하드웨어 에러에 대해 결함을 감내하는 것을 필요로 하기 때문에 결함 감내에 대한 코드를 자동으로 생성하는 연구도 진행하였다. 본 기법에서 결함 감내 설정에 따라 태스크 그래프를 수정하는 방식을 활용하였으며, 결함 감내의 비기능적 요구 사항을 응용 개발자가 쉽게 적용할 수 있도록 하였다. 또한, 결함 감내 지원하는 것과 관련하여 실제 수동으로 구현했을 경우와 비교하였고, 결함 주입 도구를 이용하여 결함 발생 시나리오를 재현하거나, 임의로 결함을 주입하는 실험을 수행하였다. 마지막으로 결함 감내를 실험할 때에 활용한 결함 주입 도구는 본 논문의 또 다른 기여 사항 중 하나로 리눅스 환경으로 대상으로 응용 영역 및 커널 영역에 결함을 주입하는 도구를 개발하였다. 시스템의 견고성을 검증하기 위해 결함을 주입하여 결함 시나리오를 재현하는 것은 널리 사용되는 방법으로, 본 논문에서 개발된 결함 주입 도구는 시스템이 동작하는 도중에 재현 가능한 결함을 주입할 수 있는 도구이다. 커널 영역에서의 결함 주입을 위해 두 종류의 결함 주입 방법을 제공하며, 하나는 커널 GNU 디버거를 이용한 방법이고, 다른 하나는 ARM 하드웨어 브레이크포인트를 활용한 방법이다. 응용 영역에서 결함을 주입하기 위해 GDB 기반 결함 주입 방법을 이용하여 동일 시스템 혹은 원격 시스템의 응용에 결함을 주입할 수 있다. 결함 주입 도구에 대한 실험은 ODROID-XU4 보드에서 진행하였다.While various software development methodologies have been proposed to increase the design productivity and maintainability of software, they usually focus on the development of application software running on a single processing element, without concern about the non-functional requirements of an embedded system such as latency and resource requirements. In this thesis, we present a model-based software development method for parallel and distributed embedded systems. An application is specified as a set of tasks that follow a set of given rules for communication and synchronization in a hierarchical fashion, independently of the hardware platform. Having such rules enables us to perform static analysis to check some software errors at compile time to reduce the verification difficulty. Platform-specific program is synthesized automatically after mapping of tasks onto processing elements is determined. The program synthesizer is also proposed to generate codes which satisfies platform requirements for parallel and distributed embedded systems. As multiple models which can express dynamic behaviors can be depicted hierarchically, the synthesizer supports to manage multiple task graphs with a different hierarchy to run tasks with parallelism. Also, the synthesizer shows methods of managing codes for heterogeneous platforms and generating various communication methods. The viability of the proposed software development method is verified with a real-life surveillance application that runs on six processing elements with three remote communication methods, and remote deep learning example is conducted to use heterogeneous multiprocessing components on distributed systems. Also, supporting a new platform and network requires a small effort by measuring and estimating development costs. Since tolerance to unexpected errors is a required feature of many embedded systems, we also support an automatic fault-tolerant code generation. Fault tolerance can be applied by modifying the task graph based on the selected fault tolerance configurations, so the non-functional requirement of fault tolerance can be easily adopted by an application developer. To compare the effort of supporting fault tolerance, manual implementation of fault tolerance is performed. Also, the fault tolerance method is tested with the fault injection tool to emulate fault scenarios and inject faults randomly. Our fault injection tool, which has used for testing our fault-tolerance method, is another work of this thesis. Emulating fault scenarios by intentionally injecting faults is commonly used to test and verify the robustness of a system. To emulate faults on an embedded system, we present a run-time fault injection framework that can inject a fault on both a kernel and application layer of Linux-based systems. For injecting faults on a kernel layer, two complementary fault injection techniques are used. One is based on Kernel GNU Debugger, and the other is using a hardware breakpoint supported by the ARM architecture. For application-level fault injection, the GDB-based fault injection method is used to inject a fault on a remote application. The viability of the proposed fault injection tool is proved by real-life experiments with an ODROID-XU4 system.Chapter 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Motivation 1 1.2 Contribution 6 1.3 Dissertation Organization 8 Chapter 2 Background 9 2.1 HOPES: Hope of Parallel Embedded Software 9 2.1.1 Software Development Procedure 9 2.1.2 Components of HOPES 12 2.2 Universal Execution Model 13 2.2.1 Task Graph Specification 13 2.2.2 Dataflow specification of an Application 15 2.2.3 Task Code Specification and Generic APIs 21 2.2.4 Meta-data Specification 23 Chapter 3 Program Synthesis for Parallel and Distributed Embedded Systems 24 3.1 Motivational Example 24 3.2 Program Synthesis Overview 26 3.3 Program Synthesis from Hierarchically-mixed Models 30 3.4 Platform Code Synthesis 33 3.5 Communication Code Synthesis 36 3.6 Experiments 40 3.6.1 Development Cost of Supporting New Platforms and Networks 40 3.6.2 Program Synthesis for the Surveillance System Example 44 3.6.3 Remote GPU-accelerated Deep Learning Example 46 3.7 Document Generation 48 3.8 Related Works 49 Chapter 4 Model Transformation for Fault-tolerant Code Synthesis 56 4.1 Fault-tolerant Code Synthesis Techniques 56 4.2 Applying Fault Tolerance Techniques in HOPES 61 4.3 Experiments 62 4.3.1 Development Cost of Applying Fault Tolerance 62 4.3.2 Fault Tolerance Experiments 62 4.4 Random Fault Injection Experiments 65 4.5 Related Works 68 Chapter 5 Fault Injection Framework for Linux-based Embedded Systems 70 5.1 Background 70 5.1.1 Fault Injection Techniques 70 5.1.2 Kernel GNU Debugger 71 5.1.3 ARM Hardware Breakpoint 72 5.2 Fault Injection Framework 74 5.2.1 Overview 74 5.2.2 Architecture 75 5.2.3 Fault Injection Techniques 79 5.2.4 Implementation 83 5.3 Experiments 90 5.3.1 Experiment Setup 90 5.3.2 Performance Comparison of Two Fault Injection Methods 90 5.3.3 Bit-flip Fault Experiments 92 5.3.4 eMMC Controller Fault Experiments 94 Chapter 6 Conclusion 97 Bibliography 99 요 약 108Docto

Design Space Exploration and Resource Management of Multi/Many-Core Systems

The increasing demand of processing a higher number of applications and related data on computing platforms has resulted in reliance on multi-/many-core chips as they facilitate parallel processing. However, there is a desire for these platforms to be energy-efficient and reliable, and they need to perform secure computations for the interest of the whole community. This book provides perspectives on the aforementioned aspects from leading researchers in terms of state-of-the-art contributions and upcoming trends

Integrating security into real-time cyber-physical systems

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) such as automobiles, power plants, avionics systems, unmanned vehicles, medical devices, manufacturing and home automation systems have distinct cyber and physical components that must work cohesively with each other to ensure correct operation. Many cyber-physical applications have “real-time” constraints, i.e., they must function correctly within predetermined time scales. A failure to protect these systems could result in significant harm to humans, the system or even the environment. While traditionally such systems were isolated from external accesses and used proprietary components and protocols, modern CPS use off-the-shelf components and are increasingly interconnected, often via networks such as the Internet. As a result, they are exposed to additional attack surfaces and have become increasingly vulnerable to cyber attacks. Enhancing security for real-time CPS, however, is not an easy task due to limited resource availability (e.g., processing power, memory, storage, energy) and stringent timing/safety requirements. Security monitoring techniques for cyber-physical platforms (a) must execute with existing real-time tasks, (b) operate without impacting the timing and safety constraints of the control logic and (c) have to be designed and executed in a way that an adversary cannot easily evade it. The objective of my research is to increase security posture of embedded real-time CPS by integrating monitoring/detection techniques that defeat cyber attacks without violating timing/safety constraints of existing tasks. My dissertation work explores the real-time security domain and shows that by employing a combination of multiple scheduling/analysis techniques and interactions between hardware/software-based security extensions, it becomes feasible to integrate security monitoring mechanisms in real-time CPS without compromising timing/safety requirements of existing tasks. In this research, I (a) develop techniques to raise the responsiveness of security monitoring tasks by increasing their frequency of execution, (b) design a hardware-supported framework to prevent falsification of actuation commands — i.e., commands that control the state of the physical system and (c) propose metrics to trade-off security with real-time guarantees. The solutions presented in this dissertation require minimal changes to system components/parameters and thus compatible for legacy systems. My proposed frameworks and results are evaluated through both, simulations and experiments on real off-the-shelf cyber-physical platforms. The development of analysis techniques and design frameworks proposed in this dissertation will inherently make such systems more secure and hence, safer. I believe my dissertation work will bring researchers and system engineers one step closer to understand how to integrate two seemingly diverse yet important fields — real-time CPS and cyber-security — while gaining a better understanding of both areas