Safe software processing by concurrent execution in a real-time operating system

The requirements for safety-related software systems increases rapidly. To detect arbitrary hardware faults, there are applicable coding mechanism, that add redundancy to the software. In this way it is possible to replace conventional multi-channel hardware and so reduce costs. Arithmetic codes are one possibility of coded processing and are used in this approach. A further approach to increase fault tolerance is the multiple execution of certain critical parts of software. This kind of time redundancy is easily realized by the parallel processing in an operating system. Faults in the program flow can be monitored. No special compilers, that insert additional generated code into the existing program, are required. The usage of multi-core processors would further increase the performance of such multi-channel software systems. In this paper we present the approach of program flow monitoring combined with coded processing, which is encapsulated in a library of coded data types. The program flow monitoring is indirectly realized by means of an operating system.

[1]  Edward J. McCluskey,et al.  Control-flow checking by software signatures , 2002, IEEE Trans. Reliab..

[2]  Edward J. McCluskey,et al.  ED4I: Error Detection by Diverse Data and Duplicated Instructions , 2002, IEEE Trans. Computers.

[3]  Massimo Violante,et al.  Soft-error detection using control flow assertions , 2003, Proceedings 18th IEEE Symposium on Defect and Fault Tolerance in VLSI Systems.

[4]  David T. Brown.  Error Detecting and Correcting Binary Codes for Arithmetic Operations , 1960, IRE Trans. Electron. Comput..

[5]  Suku Nair,et al.  Design and Evaluation of System-Level Checks for On-Line Control Flow Error Detection , 1999, IEEE Trans. Parallel Distributed Syst..

[6]  Edward J. McCluskey,et al.  Control-Flow Checking Using Watchdog Assists and Extended-Precision Checksums , 1990, IEEE Trans. Computers.

[7]  P. Forin,et al.  VITAL CODED MICROPROCESSOR PRINCIPLES AND APPLICATION FOR VARIOUS TRANSIT SYSTEMS , 1990 .

[8]  Christof Fetzer,et al.  ANB- and ANBDmem-Encoding: Detecting Hardware Errors in Software , 2010, SAFECOMP.

[9]  Shekhar Y. Borkar,et al.  Designing reliable systems from unreliable components: the challenges of transistor variability and degradation , 2005, IEEE Micro.

[10]  Jacob A. Abraham,et al.  CEDA: control-flow error detection through assertions , 2006, 12th IEEE International On-Line Testing Symposium (IOLTS'06).

[11]  Frank Schiller,et al.  A Concept for a Safe Realization of a State Machine in Embedded Automotive Applications , 2007, SAFECOMP.

[12]  Marco Torchiano,et al.  Soft-error detection through software fault-tolerance techniques , 1999, Proceedings 1999 IEEE International Symposium on Defect and Fault Tolerance in VLSI Systems (EFT'99).

[13]  Bogdan Nicolescu,et al.  Detecting Soft Errors by a Purely Software Approach: Method, Tools and Experimental Results , 2003, DATE.

[14]  Martin Müller,et al.  Software protection mechanisms for dependable systems , 2008 .

[15]  Massimo Violante,et al.  Software-Implemented Hardware Fault Tolerance , 2010 .

[16]  Christof Fetzer,et al.  Software Encoded Processing: Building Dependable Systems with Commodity Hardware , 2007, SAFECOMP.

[17]  David J. Lu.  Watchdog Processors and Structural Integrity Checking , 1982, IEEE Transactions on Computers.