C'Mon: a predictable monitoring infrastructure for system-level latent fault detection and recovery

Abstract

Embedded and real-time systems must balance between many often conflicting goals including predictability, high utilization, efficiency, reliability, and SWaP (size, weight, and power). Reliability is particularly difficult to achieve without significantly impacting the other factors. Though reliability solutions exist for application-level, they are invalidated by system-level faults that are particularly difficult to detect and recover from. This paper presents the C'Mon system for predictably and efficiently monitoring system-level execution, and validating that it conforms with the high-level analytical models that underlie the timing guarantees of the system. Latent faults such as timing errors, incorrect scheduler decisions, unbounded priority inversions, or deadlocks are detected, the faulty component is identified, and using previous work in system recovery, the system is brought back to a stable state - all without missing deadlines.