Architecture-driven platform independent deterministic replay for distributed hard real-time systems

Abstract

Distributed hard real-time systems have become a major component of many advanced technical products. Means to ensure their proper quality are thus of paramount importance. To ensure high quality software, besides preventive means also cost-effective techniques for defect removal are important. The later activity in practice includes testing in order to detect failures, subsequent diagnosis in order to pin down the observed failure to a defect, and finally the proper removal of the defect. In this chain of activities, finding the cause of a failure is often a rather difficult and long-winded undertaking. In the domain of embedded real-time systems the problem is even harder than in a standard environment because of the real-time behavior and hardware heterogeneity (development vs. target platform). Both renders the deterministic replay of faulty behavior a hard problem which today can only be addressed when a substantial amount of additional monitoring hardware is added to the system. The paper proposes to minimize the required additional hardware using an architecture-driven approach which exploits the high-level information available at the architectural level in order to achieve platform independent deterministic replay for distributed hard real-time systems at relative low cost.