Event Monitor Validation in High-Integrity Systems

Roger Pujol, Sergi Vilardell, Enrico Mezzetti, Mohamed Hassan, Jaume Abella, Francisco J. Cazorla

Abstract: Platforms for modern embedded systems equip an increasing number of high-performance features to provide the required levels of performance. Timing analysis solutions handle the complexity of these platforms by relying on hardware event monitors (HEMs) that provide insightful information about resource utilization and, hence, contention among tasks. As a result, HEMs have become a key element to warrant a safe timing behavior of a system, for which reason they must be validated. While some initial works target HEMs validation, they consider one HEM at a time and focus on those HEMs for which an expert can establish an expected value for relatively small code snippets. In this paper, we propose a methodology for the validation of those HEMs for which a specific expected value cannot be established a priori even for simple cases and, instead, needs to be validated in conjunction with other HEMs. Our method also deals with the natural variability of the HEMs' values in high-performance platforms when collected in different experiments. We illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed technique for validating HEMs related to cache coherence in a relevant platform in the avionics domain.