Non-Simultaneity as a Design Constraint

Abstract

Whether one or multiple hardware execution units are activated (i.e. CPU cores), invalid resource sharing, notably due to simultaneous accesses, proves to be problematic as it can yield to unexpected runtime behaviors with negative implications such as security or safety issues. The growing interest for off-the-shelf multi-core architectures in sensitive applications motivates the need for safe resources sharing. If critical sections are a well-known solution from imperative and non-temporized programming models, they fail to provide safety guarantees. By leveraging the time-triggered programming model, this paper aims at enforcing that identified critical windows of computations can never be simultaneously executed. We achieve this result by determining, before an application is compiled, the exact dates during which a task accesses a shared resource, which enables the off-line validation of non-simultaneity constraints. 2012 ACM Subject Classification Theory of computation → Models of computation