Green Hills Software announced that it has extended its certified multicore support of the INTEGRITY-178 tuMP safety-critical real-time operating system (RTOS) to the 11th Gen Intel Core i7 processor (formerly Tiger Lake). INTEGRITY-178 tuMP is the only RTOS to be part of the certification of a multicore system to DO-178C and CAST-32A multicore requirements. Green Hills Software has extended INTEGRITY-178 tuMP RTOS’ long-standing support for Intel processors to single board computers and systems with the latest Intel Core i7 processor, including the AMMP-304-01 mission computer from Mercury Systems.
The 11th Gen Intel Core i7 processor can deliver up to 40x better performance than traditional safety-certifiable processors when all four processor cores are active and used efficiently. Certification to RTCA/DO-178C airworthiness is very difficult for multicore processors due to the unpredictable behavior resulting from shared resource contention among processor cores. The requirements for addressing that multicore interference is specified in the CAST-32A multicore position paper. The INTEGRITY-178 tuMP RTOS is the only operating system to be part of a successful multicore certification to DO-178C and CAST-32A objectives. Avionics computers certified to DO-178C objectives using other operating systems have only one core active in a multicore processor, with the other cores typically held in reset.
The INTEGRITY-178 tuMP high-assurance RTOS from Green Hills Software is the only RTOS that has actually been part of a multicore system certified to DO-178C airborne safety requirements. INTEGRITY-178 tuMP is a multicore RTOS with support for running a multi-threaded DAL A application across multiple processor cores in symmetric multi-processing (SMP) or bound multi-processing (BMP) configurations, as well as supporting the more basic asymmetric multi-processing (AMP). INTEGRITY-178 tuMP was the first RTOS to be certified conformant to the FACE Technical Standard, edition 3.0, and it is the only RTOS with multicore interference mitigation for all shared resources, enabling the system integrator to meet CAST-32A objectives. Multicore interference happens when more than one processor core attempts simultaneous access to a shared resource, such as system memory, I/O, or the on-chip interconnect. To further ease compliance to CAST-32A, Green Hills provides bandwidth allocation and monitoring (BAM) functionality in INTEGRITY-178 tuMP that ensures that critical applications get their allocated access to shared resources in order to meet their required deadlines, significantly lowering integration and certification risk. Together, the flexible multi-processing architecture and multicore interference mitigation enable a system integrator to maximize multicore processor performance while meeting safety and security requirements.
