Multicore in Avionics – Multicore Usage Patterns and a Systems Level Approach to Certification
Dennis Rice, Wind River
As the availability of multicore processors becomes the dominant hardware technology and displacing traditional unicore processors as the basis for many avionics platforms moving into the future, many developers are struggling to migrate existing ARINC 653 applications into this new environment. This tutorial will explore the paths to success that developers can follow as they move existing, legacy applications into this new realm and the impacts that will be seen on application design, performance and capabilities that are available to them in the process. Example platform configuration using Wind River’s VxWorks 653 Multicore Edition will be used to show these tradeoffs and solutions from minimal impact to existing application code to more extensive modifications to use new ARINC 653 APIs to enable use of multicore directly in application partitions. Potential impacts on robust partitioning based on configuration will also be discussed.