Low-cost checkpointing in automotive safety-relevant systems

The use of checkpointing and roll-back recovery (CRR) schemes is common practice to increase the likelihood of a task completing with the correct result despite the presence of faults. However, the use of CRR mechanisms is challenging in the severely constrained design space of safety-relevant embedded systems, such as those controlling critical functions in the automotive domain. CRR schemes introduce non-negligible time and memory overheads that may jeopardize the feasibility of their implementation. In this paper we propose a low-cost checkpointing mechanism suitable for safety-relevant embedded systems deploying light-lockstep architectures. The proposed checkpointing mechanism increases the reliability of the system while keeping timing and memory overhead low enough.