Report on the third workshop on hot topics in software upgrades (HotSWUp'11)
ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review
FASA: a scalable software framework for distributed control systems
Proceedings of the 3rd international ACM SIGSOFT symposium on Architecting Critical Systems
Fault-tolerant fault tolerance for component-based automation systems
Proceedings of the 4th international ACM Sigsoft symposium on Architecting critical systems
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Real-time controllers handle safety-critical environments such as power grids in a continuous way. Controllers are only updated during the same maintenance periods as the plant they control. As a consequence, old software versions are usually used longer than necessary, which can have a negative impact on performance, reliability, or security. This paper presents a solution for updating component-based controllers at runtime in a non-disruptive way - there is no "bump" in the control cycle. This solution allows for simultaneous updates of real-time components with arbitrarily large states. The solution is validated by demonstrating a large-scale dynamic software update on an embedded controller with a 1 kHz control cycle on RT Linux. As a corollary, we show that an arbitrary number of components can be simultaneously updated in a non-disruptive way.