Adapting Commercial Off-The-Shelf Multicore Processors for Safety-Related Automotive Systems Using Online Monitoring

Multicores, being the latest state-of-the-art technology, gain more and more importance in automotive and aerospace systems. This technology will not only be used in infotainment and non-safety-critical applications but will also be introduced in upcoming safety-critical systems. At the moment, various commercial off-the-shelf processors are available that are, however, not built for such applications. In order to ensure correct system behavior, online monitoring can be used for processors targeting infotainment or general purpose applications. The cores and other bus masters within the MPSoC compete for the exclusive use of shared resources like a memory controller. It is of high importance to provide guarantees of usage in such cases, e.g. in terms of access time and rates. For this purpose we present an online monitoring based on a commercial off-the-shelf multicore processor that provides knowledge about the usage of the direct memory access (DMA) controller in terms of accesses and activation sources. Furthermore, with this information, conclusions about the memory controller workload are drawn. The concept is implemented by using Freescale's i.MX6 Quad platform, which is targeting automotive infotainment. This paper aims to show how such general purpose multicore processors can be partly adapted to provide evidence for safety related systems.