On the consolidation of mixed criticalities applications on multicore architectures

In this paper we propose a hybrid solution to ensure results correctness when deploying several applications with different safety requirements on a single multi-core-based system. The proposed solution is based on lightweight hardware redundancy, implemented using smart watchdogs and voter logic, combined with software redundancy. Two techniques of software redundancy are used: the first one is software temporal triple modular redundancy, used for those tasks with low crit-icality and no real-time requirement. The second software redundancy technique is triple module redundancy for tasks with high criticality and real-time requirements, assisted by a hardware voter. A hypervisor is used to separate each task in the sys-tem in an independent resource partition, thus ensuring that no functional interfer-ence is occurring. The proposed solution has been evaluated through hardware and software fault injection on two hardware platforms, featuring a dual-core processor and a quad-core processor respectively. Results show a high fault tolerance achieved using the proposed architecture.