DDC-I, a leading supplier of software and professional services for mission- and safety-critical applications, today announced Deos Fourpeaks, a verified DO-178 baseline for the Deos real-time operating system with complete Design Assurance Level A (DAL A) certification artifacts. The new baseline supports Deos cache partitioning and slack scheduling, which reduce worst-case execution time and boost overall performance without compromising safety criticality. The new baseline also features support for the ARINC 653 Part 1 Revision 3 specification, which provides the APEX API, scheduling, and time/space partitioning per the latest published ARINC 653 Standard.

“Deos was designed from the ground up to streamline the DO-178 certification process”, said Greg Rose, vice president of marketing and product management at DDC-I. “This new Deos baseline provides complete verification evidence per the guidance of DO-178 Design Assurance Level A (DAL A) and supports our latest Deos innovations, including our cache partitioning functionality.”

Cache partitioning reduces worst-case execution time, increases CPU utilization, and simplifies safety certification by reducing cache competition. By setting aside dedicated partitions for critical applications, developers can reduce interference from applications residing in other partitions (on the same core or multiple cores), thereby speeding cache access and minimizing cache flushes and refills. This not only reduces worst-case execution time, but minimizes the time that must be budgeted to critical tasks. Together with Deos slack scheduling, which harvests the unused time budgeted to time-critical tasks and allocates it to other tasks, cache partitioning boosts CPU utilization for time critical tasks and overall performance.