Real-Time Multicore @ UIUC

Multi-IMA Scheduling

Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) architecture has been widely adopted by avionics industry due to its strong temporal and spatial isolation capability for safety-critical real-time systems. This partitioning mechanism has helped ease certification process of mixed-criticality avionics applications. However, as multi-core processors are receiving wide attention from the industry, the current single core-based IMA avionics systems have become challenged by the unpredictable timing behavior of multi-core architectures primarily caused by inter-core contentions for shared resources such as cache, interconnect, and memory. To address this challenge, we develop an IMA partition management framework and its scheduling optimization method which encapsulates inter-/intra-core shared resource contention for single-core-equivalent real-time multi-core systems. By integrating pre-certified existing IMA-based single core systems into a multi-IMA multi-core system, we intend to achieve 1) backward compatibility for existing applications with no or minor modifications and 2) high time-predictability and strong isolation for mixed-critical applications.