Using Computational Stress to Derive Stress Robustness and Timing Behaviors on Hard Real-Time Operating Systems

Abstract:
Real-time systems must operate within their specified timing requirements. This is even more important for hard real-time systems as they are used in the automotive industry. Therefore, a wide variety of standards and guidelines exist to ensure that the timing requirements are met within such systems. However, timing issues can be introduced at a later point in time when the system is integrated within a larger context or needs to be extended. In addition, such timing issues can also occur due to software issues or security incidents. In this paper we want to emphasize stress injection as a practice-oriented technique to mitigate such risks of belated timing issues. With stress injection we challenge the real-time system to run at different load conditions to emulate the effect of later introduced software changes. We demonstrate how this can be done without altering the application code and discuss first results obtained via stress injection combined with hardware tracing.