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Abstract: Validation and verification of embedded systems through simulation can be conducted at many levels, from the simulation of a high-level application model to the simulation of the actual binary code using an accurate model of the processor. However, for real-time applications, the simulated execution time must be as close as possible to the execution time on the actual platform and in this case the latter gives the closest results. The main drawback of the simulation of application’s software using an accurate model of the processor resides in the development of a handwritten simulator which is a difficult and tedious task. This paper presents Harmless, a hardware architecture description language (ADL) that mainly targets real-time embedded systems. Harmless is dedicated to the generation of simulators for hardware platforms to develop and test real-time embedded applications. Compared to existing ADLs, Harmless (1) offers a more flexible description of the instruction set architecture (ISA) (2) allows to describe the microarchitecture independently of the ISA to ease its reuse and (3) compares favorably to simulators generated by the existing ADLs toolsets. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Although component middleware is increasingly used to develop distributed, real-time and embedded (DRE) systems, it poses new fault-tolerance challenges, such as the need for efficient synchronization of internal component state, failure correlation across groups of components, and configuration of fault-tolerance properties at the component granularity level. This paper makes three contributions to R&D on component-based fault-tolerance. First, it describes the COmponent Replication based on Failover Units (CORFU) component middleware, which provides fail-stop behavior and fault correlation across groups of components treated as an atomic unit in DRE systems. Second, it describes how CORFU’s Components with HEterogeneous State Synchronization (CHESS) module provides mechanisms for real-time aware state transfer and synchronization in CORFU. Third, we empirically evaluate the client failover and group shutdown capabilities of CORFU and its CHESS module and compare/contrast it with existing object-oriented fault-tolerance methods. Our results show that component middleware (1) has acceptable fault-tolerance performance for DRE systems, (2) allows timely recovery while considering failure location, size, and functional topology of the group, and finally (3) eases the burden of application development by providing middleware support for fault-tolerance at the component level. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]