Ensuring robust partitioning in multicore platforms for IMA systems

Robust partitioning enforcement is a mandatory requirement in IMA¹ systems. In this paper, we refine this requirement in the context of multicore processors and discuss a strategy to ensure it. We focus on a scenario in which several ARINC 653 partitions hosted on the same platform are executed at the same time on different cores. When this scenario is deployed on modern COTS² hardware, robust partitioning may be impaired by inter-core conflicts sequences. The issue with such a deployment strategy lies in the isolated parallel execution of several partitions. The approach presented here aims at identifying conditions that entail inter-core conflicts with a sufficient level of detail. This representation helps identifying robust partitioning failure causes. Such information is a first step towards an acceptation of true parallelism in partitioned systems, i.e. deployment on multicores.