Space & Time Partitioning with ARINC 653 and pragma profile

• Authors: Joyce L. Tokar
• Venue: IRTAW '03 Proceedings of the 12th international workshop on Real-time Ada
• Year: 2003

The development of embedded applications is entering into a new domain with the availability of new high-speed processors and low cost on-chip memory. As the result of these new developments in hardware, there is an interest in enabling multiple applications to share a single processor and memory. To facilitate such a model the execution time and memory space of each application must be protected from other applications in the system.The ARINC Specification 653[1] provides the definition of an APplication EXecutive (APEX) that supports space and time partitioning of applications. ARINC 653 systems are composed of software partitions. Each partition is a separate application and there is dedicated memory space for each partition thereby providing space partitioning. Similarly, the APEX provides a dedicated time slice for each partition to support time partitioning. ARINC 653 supports a multitasking environment in each partition through a well-defined set of process communication mechanisms and preemptive priority based scheduling.The availability of a multi-tasking environment within each ARINC 653 partition reduces the need for the use of the Ada process model in the development of applications to execute on top of the ARINC 653 APEX. This paper will presents a proposal for a new profile definition, ARINC_653_Processes, for consideration using the pragma Profile capability of Ada.