A hardware/software approach to detect memory corruptions in embedded systems

Recently, applications in embedded systems have increasingly become complex. This requires having tools to prevent or detect memory corruption errors during the software development process. Unfortunately, because of hardware cost and performance penalty, most of embedded processors lack to be equipped a MMU (Memory Management Units) which allows protecting memory accesses in general purpose computer systems. In this paper, an approach to detect memory corruption at run-time by combining hardware/software is presented. A FPGA-based off-chip detector is proposed. It is hooked on memory bus to monitor memory access for multitasking Real-time Operating System (RTOS) applications. Some testbeds are used for evaluating this model and they give good results. Besides, a comparison of real-time schedulability is also carried out. Our solution causes the real-time schedulability of the system dropped-off 9,63%.