Multicore platforms represent the future of the embedded systems but some issues, as the use of shared resources, introduce relevant problems for critical applications due to the indeterminism of the execution and, as consequence, the difficulty to determine the worst case execution time of the critical activities. Under this view, the use of multicore systems for critical applications has a barrier in how a mixed criticality system should be organized and executed.

The proposed industrial experiment has as main goal to demonstrate the implementation of Mixed Criticality Systems using representative application of the avionic domain on multicore systems platforms based on the multicore XtratuM hypervisor.

The approach is based on the IMA architecture for multi-core platforms using XtratuM multicore hypervisor as partitioning kernel and LithOS as ARINC-653 guest OS. XtratuM will provide full-virtualization techniques taking profit of the hardware virtualization support provided by the selected hardware platform and resource management techniques to limit the use of shared resources by non-critical partitions.

The experiment will use a hardware platform based on PowerPC, the virtualization layer based on XtratuM to support the execution of several isolated partitions with different levels of criticality and the applications.