Using Model Checking to Identify Timing Interferences on Multicore Processors

Multicore platforms provide the computing capabilities and the power efficiency required by the complex applications embedded in aeronautical, spatial, and automotive systems. Some of the hardware resources provided by the platform-including buses, caches, IPs-are shared between tasks executing concurrently and in parallel on different cores. This sharing may lead tasks to interfere with each other. Therefore, crucial design activities are to identify interferences, and bound the penalty induced by those interferences, as part of the demonstration of compliance of applications to their temporal requirements. A first and conservative approach is to consider that every access to a shared resource leads to an interference. This safe approach is usually too pessimistic to be useful. We propose a less pessimistic approach, which takes into account the actual behavior of the application and the hardware to filter out situations where interferences cannot occur. Our method relies on (i) the behavioral modeling of the applications and their execution platform using the LNT formal language, (ii) the definition of interferences using temporal properties, and (iii) the exploitation of the behavioral model and the temporal properties using the CADP formal verification toolbox. This method is applied to the Infineon AURIX TC275 system-on-chip. Experimental results indicate that our approach is not only safe but also prevents reporting spurious interferences compared to a purely structural analysis.