SLOPE: Safety LOg PEripherals implementation and software drivers for a safe RISC-V microcontroller unit

Abstract

The focus of this manuscript is related to the main safety issues regarding a mixed criticality system running multiple concurrent tasks. Our concerns are related to the guarantee of Freedom of Interference between concurrent partitions, and to the respect of the Worst Case Execution Time for tasks. Moreover, we are interested in the evaluation of resources budgeting and the study of system behavior in case of occurring random hardware failures. In this paper we present a set of Safety LOg PEripherals (SLOPE): Performance Monitoring Unit (PMU), Execution Tracing Unit (ETU), Error Management Unit (EMU), Time Management Unit (TMU) and Data Log Unit (DLU); then, an implementation of SLOPE on a single core RISC-V architecture is proposed. Such peripherals are able to collect software and hardware information about execution, and eventually trigger recovery actions to mitigate a possible dangerous misbehavior. We show results of the hardware implementation and software testing of the units with a dedicated software library. For the PMU we standardized the software layer according to embedded Performance Application Programming Interface (ePAPI), and compared its functionality with a bare-metal use of the library. To test the ETU we compared the hardware simulation results with software ones, to understand if overflow may occur in internal hardware buffers during tracing. In conclusion, designed devices introduce new instruments for system investigation for RISC-V technologies and can generate an execution profile for safety related tasks.