Memory Isolation in Many-Core Embedded Systems

The current approach to developing mixed-criticality systems is by partitioning the hardware resources (processors, memory and I/O devices) among the different applications. Partitions are isolated from each other both in the temporal and the spatial domain, so that low-criticality applications cannot compromise other applications with a higher level of criticality in case of misbehaviour. New architectures based on many-core processors open the way to highly parallel systems in which each partition can be allocated to a set of dedicated processor cores, thus simplifying partition scheduling and temporal separation. Moreover, spatial isolation can also benefit from many-core architectures, by using simpler hardware mechanisms to protect the address spaces of different applications. This paper describes an architecture for manycore embedded partitioned systems, together with some implementation advice for spatial isolation.