Escalonador em hardware para deteção de falhas em sistemas embarcados de tempo real

摘要

Nowadays, several safety-critical embedded systems support real-time applications and their development represents a great challenge to engineers and researchers due to the risk of catastrophic effects on the system generated by a fault. Usually, real-time embedded systems process input data and generate output responses according to the functional specification of the system. However, the high complexity of the applications has made the adoption of Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOS) necessary in order to simplify the design of real-time embedded systems. Thus, the RTOS serves as an interface between software and hardware. However, real-time systems can be affected by transient faults during application running or even during the RTOS execution. Consequently, these faults can affect both, the correctness of the output responses generated and the task’s deadline specified during the project of the system. In this context, this work proposes a new hardware-based approach able to increase the reliability of the real-time embedded systems. The proposed technique is based on the development of an Infrastructure IP core (I-IP) called Hardware-Scheduler (Hw-S), which monitors the tasks’ execution in order to verify if tasks’ execution flow and the tasks’ deadline are respected. A case study implemented in an FPGA running a set of benchmarks has been developed in order to validate the proposed approach. The benchmarks developed exploit most of the RTOS services. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed technique, Hardware and Software fault injection campaigns have been performed. Indeed, the introduced overheads have been estimated. The obtained results demonstrate that the fault latency associated to the Hw-S is smaller than the one associated to the RTOS and further that the Hw-S’s fault coverage is higher than the RTOS’. Finally, the Hw-S introduces an area overhead of about 6% with respect to the Plasma microprocessor area.