Actions
Forum Thread Details
  • State Not Answered
  • Replies 3 replies
  • Subscribers 358 subscribers
  • Views 366 views
  • Users 0 members are here
Related

ARM's

lukwolf

Hi!! I'm trying to make a fault tolerant system with Zedboard, for this I need to know:

1) Is it possible to load the same source code on both ARM and comparing the outputs of these?

2) Subsequently, Could choose the ARM that would execute the code and "turn off" the other ARM?

3) Is it possible to do this from PlanAhead or Vivado?

Thank you very much

  • 0

    Hi lukwolf,

    It sounds like what you want to do would fall into a "dual-core lockstep" safety strategy for which you would need a CPU architecture which supports this functionality.

    The ARM Cortex-A9 MPcore of the Zynq-7000 All Programmable SoC would support a Symmetric dual core safety strategy.

    Take a look at this article from EETimes to see the different strategies which are most prevalent:

    http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1279168

    To answer your questions:

    1) Yes, you can run the same code on both ARM cores and have each application compare it's results against that of the other cores results.

    2) This one is a little bit tricky since it sounds like you will need some sort of method to determine which CPU has the "correct" result so that the other CPU can be "parked" safely until a known good state can be restored.  That implementation would be up to you since the implementation will depend upon the degree of fault tolerance required by your system.

    3) You can setup the hardware platform using PlanAhead or Vivado such that the processing system is enabled and add any Programmable Logic "soft peripherals" you might need for your application.  However, I believe that you will find that a lot of the work for such a system must be done within the software running on the ARM processing cores.  You can develop that software using Xilinx SDK.

    You might find the ZedBoard version of XAPP1079 useful.  Look for "ZedBoard version of XAPP1079: Simple AMP Bare-Metal System Running on Both Cortex-A9 Processors" found on our Reference Designs/Tutorials page useful for getting started with developing application code in SDK for the two processing cores.

    http://www.zedboard.org/design/1521/11

    Please feel free to share your findings with our community.

    Regards,

    -Kevin

  • 0 in reply to zedhed

    Thank you very much Kevin, took about 2 months working with Zedboard Rev. C, especially with PlanAhead and SDK and did not know who could do what I wanted with these tools. Thank you very much, I will share what I do if I get my goal.

  • 0

    This is all coding and I can understand the reason behind teaching this through bestdissertation because the coming era is all about coding and who will learn it now will survive easily.