Developing portable embedded software for multicore systems through formal abstraction and refinement

Abstract

Run-time management (RTM) systems are used in embedded systems to dynamically adapt hardware performance to minimise energy consumption. An RTM system implementation is coupled with the hardware platform specifications and is implemented individually for each specific platform. A significant challenge is that RTM software can require laborious manual adjustment across different hardware platforms due to the diversity of architecture characteristics. Hardware specifications vary from one platform to another and include a number of characteristic such as the number of supported voltage and frequency (VF) settings. Formal modelling offers the potential to simplify the management of platform diversity by shifting the focus away from handwritten platform-specific code to platform-independent models from which platform-specific implementations are automatically generated. The article presents an overview of the motivations for this work. It goes on to overview the RTM architecture and requirements and introduce the Event-B formal method and its tool support. The article then describes the Event-B model of two different RTMs and presents the portability support provided by formal modelling and code generation. Finalyy, it reviews the verification and experimental results.