Safe Virtual Interrupts Leveraging Distributed Shared Resources and Core-to-Core Communication on Many-Core Platforms

Modern many-core platforms offer sufficient redundant resources for increasing availability and fault-tolerance of multiple applications, also of different criticality (mixed-criticality). A suitable platform must allow remapping applications and replacing peripherals dynamically. Mapping to distributed resources but also communication among resources ideally is transparent and flexible to allow changes at run time. Communication additionally has to be predictable, especially for safety-critical applications, and can be efficiently implemented by the use of interrupt requests. This paper presents a scalable interrupt translation mechanism supporting flexible and transparent communication among resources. Our contribution is of particular benefit for legacy applications but also eases development of new applications. A fast and predictable monitoring and control mechanism enforces specified behavior of applications and peripherals communicating with critical applications at run time. This significantly reduces integration effort for mixed-critical applications on a shared platform, and thus makes many-core platforms more attractive for embedded and safety-critical systems.

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