Implementation of an ARINC-653 Complied Operating System On A Multi-core Platform

Increasing use of the integrated modular avionics (IMA) architecture has helped reduce the size, weight and power consumption of avionics systems by consolidating multiple software functions on a same processor. At the same time as the accelerated adoption rate of IMA architectures, multi-core microprocessors have gained popularity due to stagnating performances of single-core offerings. Multi-core processors promise to increase software functions integration, but they are still not widely accepted in avionics, for reasons of complexity which affect safety. In this text we propose to adapt at an existing robust partitioning kernel, so that it supports the deployment of partitions on several cores of a multi-core processor. We describe our port work of POK OS from a single-core x86 emulator to an ARM architecture based multi-core platform called the ARM VEXPRESS-A9, and purpose guidelines to integrate ARM’s recently announced virtualization extension in POK.