BELK-TN-001: Real-timeness, system integrity and TrustZone® technology on AMP configuration
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Contents
HistoryEdit
| Version | Date | BELK version | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0.9.0 | September 2015 | 3.0.0 | Internal draft |
IntroductionEdit
Because of widely available Internet connectivity, nowadays security concerns are not longer limited to PCs, servers and workstations but have become common to many embedded systems as well. To deal with this kind of challenges, several hardware and software technologies have been developed. ARM® TrustZone® technology is one of these. As stated in [1], Xilinx Zynq-7000 AP SoC natively supports TrustZone® technology, since it integrates dual-core ARM® Cortex™-A9 MPCore™ processor.
Even if this technology has been conceived primarily to address security issues, embedded systems designers can leverage it to implement innovative configurations, satisfying different in nature requirements that typically arise in industrial applications and deep embedded systems[a]. Two of such requirements are real-timeness and system integrity[b].
This White Paper describes the TrustZone-based solution that DAVE Embedded Systems has implemented to meet all these requirements on BORA and BORAX platforms. A technical description of the adopted approach is provided. Also, performance and characterization tests are detailed and considerations about future developments and improvements are included.
This solution can be considered as a sort of natural evolution on the traditional AMP configuration described in [3]. For this reason, reading of this document is highly recommended.
Limitations of traditional AMP configurationsEdit
Xilinx Zynq AP architecture provides unprecedented possibilities in terms of integration. In industrial world applications, this is often leveraged to combine on a single chip the implementation of real-time tasks with generic software applications and functionalities that don't have specific requirements in terms of real-timeness[c]. In addition, the flexibility offered by the FPGA - known as Programmable Logic or PL for short - allows system designer to implement in hardware custom IPs to add new interfaces and peripherals or to move processing modules from the software to the hardware world[d].
to one of the most common The following list details the requirements that must be met. They have been
[3] TBD
TrustZone-based approachEdit
TBD
OverviewEdit
The major difference with respect to the traditional AMP configuration is the use of a monitor
TOPPERS SafeG (Nagoya University) http://www.wiki.xilinx.com/Multi-OS+Support+%28AMP+%26+Hypervisor%29#Asymmetric%20Multi%20Processing%20%28AMP%29%20Configurations-Open%20Source%20or%20Freely%20Available%20Solutions-TOPPERS%20SafeG%20%28Nagoya%20University%29
https://www.toppers.jp/safeg.html
https://www.toppers.jp/en/safeg.html
L2 cache managementEdit
TBD
Characterization and performance testsEdit
TBD
Isolation vs performancesEdit
TBD
ConclusionsEdit
TBD
ReferencesEdit
- ↑ Yashu Gosain and Prushothaman Palanichamy, Xilinx WP429 - TrustZone Technology Support in Zynq-7000 All Programmable SoCs (v1.0), May 20, 2014
- ↑ Ed Hallett, Giulio Corradi, Steven McNeil, Xilinx WP461 - Xilinx Reduces Risk and Increases Efficiency for IEC61508 and ISO26262 Certified Safety Applications (v1.0), April 9, 2015
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 DAVE Embedded Systems, AN-BELK-001: Asymmetric Multiprocessing (AMP) on Bora – Linux FreeRTOS
- ↑ These kind of requirements are often totally independent of Internet connectivity
- ↑ In this context, for the terms integrity and security the definitions provided by [2] are in use:
- security refers to a system’s immunity to data disclosure or loss as a result of the unlawful electronic penetration of the system’s protections and defenses
- integrity denotes the certainty that a system cannot be improperly altered.
- ↑ Network connectivity is an example of such functionalities.
- ↑ Powerful tools have been introduced in the market recently that facilitate this process significantly. One of these is SDSoC. Bora and BoraX are two of the supported hardware platforms.