Dynamic Mitigation of Multi-Core Interference in Safety-Critical Systems

Over the last two decades, multicore architectures have become the de facto standard for processors. With the avionics industry lagging roughly 10 to 20 years behind, it is only since the early 2020’s that multicore architectures are pursued more seriously, as evidenced for example by the issue of AMC / AC 20-193 by the EASA/ FAA in 2022 and 2024 respectively. While they enable many advantages such as increased compute density and higher bandwidth between processes, they also come with the big disadvantage of degraded isolation between cores which can cause interference in the temporal behavior of programs. For safety-critical applications relying on predictable timing that is a major problem. This paper explores a novel approach to mitigate multicore interference, relying on continuous measurement of computational progress using WebAssembly fuel, enabling dynamic mitigation of the multicore interference effects — irrespective of the specific interference channel.