Green Hills Software announces support for multicore processors in INTEGRITY-178B high-assurance multi-level-secure real-time operating system

Green Hills Software has raised the bar by offering the embedded computing markets a safety- and security-critical operating system for multicore processors from a trusted and reliable supplier of high-assurance operating systems. This update of INTEGRITY-178B maintains its exceptional support for robust partitioning, yet now provisions this fundamental multi-level-secure operating system requirement across multiple cores in an operating environment that supports the combination of Asynchronous Multiprocessing (AMP) and Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP), by utilizing a patent-pending approach to multicore processor scheduling, defined as Time-variant Unified Multiprocessing (tuMP, pronounced “2-MP”).

For developers of real-time embedded computing systems with security- and/or safety-critical computing requirements, the advent of multicore processors has created a fundamental problem: how to develop, integrate or port previously independent applications running on single-core processors to an operating environment where these independent applications operate on a processor containing two or more independent processing cores with shared system resources. Several multicore operating system paradigms have been developed in the past, including Asymmetric Multiprocessing (AMP), where each core runs a completely independent executable; Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP), where an executable is designed to make use of multiple cores simultaneously; and combinations of both (some cores used for AMP, other cores used for SMP). The rigidness of these usage paradigms is evident when attempting to integrate additional applications into a multicore processor-based platform.

Green Hills Software’s latest version of INTEGRITY-178B builds upon a verifiable ten-year service history and certification pedigree in critical airborne avionics, communications and flight control systems by adding new state-of-the-art operating system capabilities for multicore processors. This new functionality enables multiple independent safety- and/or security-critical applications to execute on a multicore operating environment in a predictable and bounded manner. These new INTEGRITY-178B capabilities naturally include support for AMP and SMP, yet provide multicore control such that the application independence is retained even when sharing a processor’s multiple cores and other system resources.

Since any single core in a multicore processor may provide more execution capabilities than any single application requires, and since some of these applications may be designed to utilize multiple cores simultaneously, Green Hills Software has added another dimension to its partition scheduler design that efficiently and practically utilizes multicore processors. This new and innovative scheduling method, tuMP, results in a single OS (i.e. unified) that provides practical time variant scheduling of both AMP and SMP applications simultaneously by enabling the association of cores and applications into groupings (called Affinity Groups) corresponding to some intended function (or functions). These Affinity Groups define how cores will be utilized by one or more applications, with the Affinity Groups (grouping of cores and applications) being permitted to vary over time. Affinity Groups may be scheduled independent of other Affinity Groups, permitting time-lines that closely correspond to application requirements, yet also permitting other sets of Affinity Groups to be developed that can make use of any of the time windows where cores are not being utilized. Any new application (or extension of an existing application) can make use of the unallocated execution time across the entire multicore processor.

The latest version of the INTEGRITY-178B operating system and the operational environment it provides are configurable such that interference between applications is prevented or sufficiently controlled such that the interference can be accurately predicted and accounted for. With its groundbreaking tuMP operating system scheduling approach for multicore processors, INTEGRITY-178B extends partitioning support beyond single-core processors, ensuring this highly flexible capability can continue to be effectively used to host multiple applications while preserving resources for application growth without concern about future availability of new single-core processor designs. INTEGRITY-178B for multicore architectures is initially available for Freescale Semiconductor’s family of QorIQ processors with P4080 support available first. INTEGRITY-178B is also available with Green Hills Software’s MULTI®/AdaMULTI™ integrated development environment (including optimizing C, C++ and Ada95 compilers).