Using Resource Partitioning to Build Secure, Survivable Embedded Systems

Introduction

Virtually every embedded system today is connected, either physically or wirelessly, to the outside world. This network connectivity creates numerous possibilities for ...

Secure Compartments

To address these reliability and security issues, some designs place virtual compartments, or partitions, around groups of software processes and allocate ...

Avoiding Process Starvation

Nonetheless, building a reliable system involves more than partitioning functionality into separate memory domains. For many systems, ensuring resource availability ...

Fixed Partition Schedulers

To address these problems, some operating systems offer a fixed-cycle partition scheduler that allows the system designer to group processes into partitions and to allocate ...

Adaptive Partitioning Schedulers

Another approach, called adaptive partitioning, addresses these drawbacks by providing a more dynamic scheduling algorithm. Like fixed-cycle partitioning ...

Partition Inheritance

To further enforce CPU budgets, a partitioning scheduler can provide partition inheritance. The principle behind this mechanism is simple: Whenever a server process ...

Increased System Availability

When a hardware or software subsystem fails in a high availability embedded system, automated recovery functions must return the system to ...

Scaling Partitions on Multicore Processors

To date, partitioning has been used almost exclusively in single-processor environments. However, with the growing proliferation of multi-core processors ...

Pain-free Software Integration

Partitioning can also avoid the performance and reliability problems that inevitably arise when integrating multiple software subsystems. For example, an OEM may ...

Conflicting Demands

Embedded software is becoming so complex that, without some form of partitioning, system designers and software engineers will be hard-pressed to satisfy the conflicting ...