Multi-source and multicore automotive ECUs - OS protection mechanisms and scheduling

As the demand for computing power is quickly increasing in the automotive domain, car manufacturers and tier-one suppliers are gradually introducing multicore ECUs in their electronic architectures. Additionally, these multicore ECUs offer new features such as higher levels of parallelism which ease the respect of the safety requirements such as the ISO 26262 and the implementation of other automotive use-cases. These new features involve also more complexity in the design, development and verification of the software applications. Hence, OEMs and suppliers will require new tools and methodologies for deployment and validation. In this paper, we review the operating system protection mechanisms (e.g., memory, timing), needed for multi-source software in a safety critical context, with a clear focus on AUTOSAR OS which is the upcoming defacto standard for automotive ECUs. Then, we identify the main use-cases for automotive multicore ECUs and present solutions for the scheduling in a context where there are hundreds of software components and only a few OS tasks are allowed. Finally, experiments aim to assess the load level that can be reached on realistic case-studies.