Safe Online Reconfiguration of Mixed-Criticality Real-Time Systems

In mixed-criticality real-time systems, system resources must be sufficiently separated to guarantee non-interference of critical functions. This leads to fixed boundaries between critical and non-critical parts of a system impeding change, repair, or proactive means to improve reliability. With conventional methods, moving the boundaries at runtime to manage the resource usage without respecting essential isolation requirements in mixed-criticality systems increases the risk of failure and must, therefore, be avoided. In this paper, we present and evaluate a safe online reconfiguration approach for many-core platforms. It satisfies safety standards isolation requirements and supports continuous real-time system operation as required in many application domains. It is particularly suited to provide proactive actions in the face of foreseen system failures improving availability without increased risk of failure during reconfiguration. Experimental results on a realistic usecase indicate that the proposed approach allows predictable online reconfigurations with tolerable latency overhead.