DO-178C Level A multicore interference mitigation for Arm Cortex-A72 processor introduced by Green Hills

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. – Green Hills Software in Santa Barbara, Calif., is introducing DO-178C Level A multicore interference mitigation for Arm Cortex-A72 processor cores.

As part of the INTEGRITY-178 Time-Variant Unified Multi-Processing (tuMP) real-time operating system (RTOS), the bandwidth allocation and monitoring (BAM) functionality enables software architects to allocate and enforce bandwidth limits to shared resources for each processor core.

By guaranteeing access to shared resources based on application requirements or assurance level, BAM mitigates multicore interference and minimizes multicore worst-case execution time (WCET).

Multicore interference occurs when several processor cores attempt to access the same shared resource, such as memory, shared cache, I/O, or the on-chip interconnect.

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The BAM interference mitigation functionality in software monitors and strictly enforces the use of the shared resources as defined by the system integrator. When coupled with Green Hills Software's multicore SoC-specific WCET utility libraries, BAM ensures that critical partitions meet their required deadlines while enabling other lower criticality partitions to execute on other cores simultaneously with no impact on the critical applications.

This remains true even as the other partitions are modified or as new partitions are introduced into the system. This is a vital capability for sustainment and growth of critical systems based on multicore architectures.

The INTEGRITY-178 tuMP safety- and security-critical RTOS is designed simultaneously to meet DO-178C design assurance level (DAL) A and the separation kernel protection profile (SKPP v1.03) as defined by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).

INTEGRITY-178 tuMP is a multicore RTOS with support for any combination of asymmetric multi-processing (AMP), symmetric multi-processing (SMP), and bound multi-processing (BMP). For more information contact Green Hills Software online at www.ghs.com.