Automotive Embedded Software: Migration Challenges to Multi-Core Computing Platforms

The introduction of multi-core computing platforms aims at providing more computing resources and additional interfaces to answer the needs of new automotive control strategies with respect to computing performances and connectivity (e.g. connected vehicle, hybrid powertrains). At the same time, the parallel execution and resulting resources and timing conflicts require a paradigm change for the embedded software. Consequently, efficient migration of legacy software on multi-core platform, while guaranteeing at least the same level of integrity and performance as for single cores, is a significant challenge. The contributions of this paper are (1) to provide a state-of-practice survey on multi-core CPUs and operating systems for the automotive domain, and (2) based on this survey to provide guidelines for the migration of legacy SW. Finally the related challenges and opportunities for the development of high-integrity control systems on multi-cores, as platform for dependable systems are discussed.