Embedded Systems Learning Center

WHAT IS SR-IOV AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT FOR EMBEDDED DEVICES?

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF POSIX^® FOR EMBEDDED SYSTEMS?

Preview:  "The board support package (BSP) is the glue software that allows an embedded real-time operating system (RTOS) to run on a specific target board.  Creating a BSP for your chosen board is a detailed software engineering task that takes 2 to 8 weeks.  Expect an embedded software consultant to charge $20,000 to $100,000 for the work.  The task involves interfacing the RTOS to the new board’s memory layout as well as to a timer, a serial console, and a network interface, at least.  Because it is the foundation of your software, it is important that it be high quality and support all the peripherals you need. This article will guide you through the minefield of getting the right BSP and suggest options..."

Preview:  "A DO-178B/C Reusable Software Component (RSC) is a software collection that is recognized as meeting the requirements of RTCA/DO-178B/C and that may be used on more than one project without having to regenerate certification artifacts.  The LynxOS-178 RTOS is the first and only COTS operating system to receive acceptance for re-usability from the FAA for DO-178B/C certification.  The FAA grants RSC acceptance as part of a normal certification process, provided that the applicant complies with the guidance policy defined in FAA Advisory Circular AC 20-148. The acceptance allows future users of the DO-178B/C RSC to deploy the software without the added cost and risk of re-certification..."

This week saw Lynx’s cache partitioning feature for Lynx MOSA.ic™ demonstrated for the first time at the Collins Aerospace Embedded Computing Conference in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Cache partitioning is a new feature of Lynx MOSA.ic™ released in September 2019 and based on Intel’s Cache Allocation Technology (CAT) CPU hardware feature.  What is Cache Allocation Technology (CAT)?  Cache Allocation Technology (CAT) has been available in Intel chips since 2015. Together with Cache Monitoring Technology (CMT) and Memory Bandwidth Monitoring (MBM), CAT forms a suite of hardware features aimed at mitigating the "noisy neighbor" problem..."

Preview:  "The objective of the U.S. Department of Defense’s (DoD) Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) is to design systems with highly cohesive, loosely coupled, and severable modules that can be competitively sourced from independent suppliers. As a software development framework for rapidly building comprehensible software systems out of independent application modules, Lynx MOSA.ic^TM is designed specifically to deliver on the open architecture vision of MOSA. In traditional platform architectures, applications are compiled against APIs provided by an OS and run as processes on the OS. The means by which multiple applications are realized onto the CPU..."

Preview:  "While Meltdown and Spectre challenge the validity of longstanding software and hardware designs, they also provide us with insights into how to defend systems against them; in revealing problems, they point us to solutions.  After all, not all systems were vulnerable.  Some deployed critical systems were, in fact, protected—not requiring patches, reconfigures, recompiles, or redesigns.  What distinguishes these resilient systems is a unique kernel technology based on the work of John Rushby that provides system developers a stronger ability to separate critical computing environments through increased hardware control. In this paper, we (1) detail the mechanics of Meltdown and Spectre; (2) introduce an alternative kernel technology that is immune to Meltdown; and (3) provide a system development approach that mitigates Spectre attacks..."

Preview:  "The complexity of today’s automobiles is increasing with every new model on the market.  A modern car can contain hundreds of electronic control units and with connectivity and autonomy becoming commonplace, this is increasing dramatically as we enter the 2020s.  Many of these systems up until a few years ago have safely run on microcontrollers on an unsecured vehicle network, and this has been fine; the networks were ‘air-gapped’ from the rest of the world, and the risk of a malicious attacker causing any kind of danger to a car’s occupants by directly plugging in a new device was as likely as someone cutting the brake lines.  The automotive industry on the whole were happy with this risk. Today, however, we are seeing a shift from mechanical cars that use computing for assistance, to computerized cars that use mechanics for movement. As the Internet of Things (Iot), artificial intelligence (AI), and autonomy find their way into automotive designs..."

Preview:  "CAST-32A presents the coordinated position of avionics certification authorities regarding Multi-Core Processors (MCPs).  While today’s aerospace ecosystem could benefit from the use of MCPs, when CAST-32A was published, FAA/EASA had not yet devised a means to obtain certification credit for safety-critical software deployed to an MCP.  Toward that end, the CAST-32A position paper identifies topics of concern that could impact the safety, performance, and integrity of DO-178C aviation software deployed to MCP(s)...."