CSR: Small: Quest: A Real-Time Operating System for Multicore Processors

CSR：小型：Quest：多核处理器的实时操作系统

• 批准号: 1117025
• 负责人: Richard West
• 金额: $ 40万
• 依托单位: Trustees of Boston University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2011
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2011-08-15 至 2015-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1117025&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CSR; Small; Quest; Real; Time

Multicore processors are becoming ubiquitous among high-end servers, personal computers, mobile phones and embedded devices. While these processors can provide higher performance at lower power than single-core architectures, they pose significant challenges for system designers. This is particularly true in real-time embedded systems, such as in avionic and automotive control, manufacturing, and healthcare. In these systems, tasks often have critical timing requirements, with deadlines that must be met to avoid potentially catastrophic outcomes. Providing timing guarantees on multicore processors is made difficult by contention for shared on-chip caches and memory bus bandwidth, and other factors such as hardware interrupts, instruction pipelines and simultaneous multithreading that affect predictability.This project focuses on the design of a real-time operating system that addresses micro-architectural resource contention and enforces predictable behavior on multicore processors. This system called ?Quest? is centered around time as a first class resource, guaranteeing real-time shares of computational resources among all tasks, including interrupts and application threads. Using hardware performance counters available on modern processors, this project implements a real-time performance monitoring subsystem to influence resource management.An additional aspect of this work focuses on the use of hardware sandboxing techniques to guarantee the system is not compromised by ill-written software, such as drivers or services implemented by third party developers. This is especially relevant given the complexity of modern software systems that cannot easily be verified to behave correctly using only static methods. As part of the development of Quest, hardware virtualization capabilities are investigated to enforce heightened software reliability, in particular, techniques for isolating software components of a system, while ensuring predictability, The outcomes of this work will impact the design of systems software on multicore processors. A greater understanding of hardware features to improve or ease the construction of software systems is gained, especially those with safety-critical requirements. Investigations into system predictability and safety will help prevent potentially disastrous outcomes for mission-critical tasks. This work could lead to more robust systems that avoid costs of failure in terms of loss of lives, equipment, or money. The Quest software will be shared among the research community and used in courses involving operating systems.

在高端服务器，个人计算机，手机和嵌入式设备中，多层处理器正在变得无处不在。尽管这些处理器可以比单核体系结构提供更高的功率性能，但它们对系统设计师构成了重大挑战。在实时嵌入式系统中尤其如此，例如在航空和汽车控制，制造和医疗保健中。在这些系统中，任务通常具有关键的时机要求，必须按时完成任务，以避免潜在的灾难性结果。通过争夺共享的芯片卡车和存储总线带宽以及其他因素，例如硬件中断，指导管道和同时影响可预测性的多线程，因此很难为多功能处理器提供时间保证。 这个系统称为“任务？作为一流资源以时间为中心，确保所有任务之间的计算资源的实时共享，包括中断和应用程序线程。 该项目使用现代处理器上可用的硬件性能计数器实现了实时性能监控子系统来影响资源管理。本工作的其他方面着重于使用硬件沙盒技术来保证该系统的使用不受编写不写的软件的损害，例如第三方开发人员实施的驱动程序或服务。 鉴于现代软件系统的复杂性，仅使用静态方法才能正确地表现，这是特别重要的。 作为Quest开发的一部分，研究了硬件虚拟化功能以实施增强的软件可靠性，尤其是用于隔离系统软件组件的技术，同时确保可预测性，这项工作的结果将影响多层处理器上系统软件的设计。获得了对硬件功能的更深入的了解，以改善或简化软件系统的构建，尤其是那些具有关键安全要求的功能。 对系统可预测性和安全性的调查将有助于预防关键任务的潜在灾难性结果。这项工作可能会导致更强大的系统，从而避免因生命，设备或金钱损失而失败的成本。该任务软件将在研究社区中共享，并用于涉及操作系统的课程。