Evaluation of Thread-Based Virtual Duplex Systems in Embedded Environments

: Virtual duplex systems have emerged as an alternative to traditional duplex systems, trading structural for temporal redundancy. When used in dependable embedded systems, virtual duplex systems provide a cost benefit because they require only one instead of two processors. In order to lighten the burden of this single processor, and in order to obey real-time requirements in embedded systems, the overhead due to the temporal redundancy must be low. As context-switch time constitutes a significant fraction of this overhead, we propose to use threads instead of processes to reduce the overhead in the error-free case and allow for faster detection of faults. Instead of using POSIX threads, we propose emulated multithreading to further reduce overhead. This technique allows very fine-grain execution and very short times between checkpoints. We evaluate the proposed concepts quantitatively.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: GI
• Authors: Jörg Keller, Andreas Grävinghoff
• Keywords: Duplex Systems, GI 2003, Temporal Redundancy, Theoretical Computer Science, Virtual Duplex Systems