Solid Sands’ SuperTest Toolset Provides Ready-Made Test and Validation Solution

December 13, 2021

Blog

Most of today’s safety-critical embedded software applications are comprised of three components: developer written application code, standard library components, and a real-time operating system (RTOS). Rolland Dudemaine, the Vice-President of Engineering at eSOL Europe, verifies that the latter piece is why compliance with safety standards, such as ISO 26262 for automotive, is so important.

eSOL chose the Solid Sands’ SuperTest test and validation suite for C and C++ compilers and libraries to undertake a crucial part of this job. With multi-core processors for automotive and other safety-critical applications currently sporting tens or hundreds of cores on one chip, verifying operating system compliance is a critical part of the company’s development effort.

“Multi-core processing is a trend we identified a long time ago. We created an operating system called eMCOS, designed to run on systems with up to 256 cores and sometimes even more, which we currently provide to customers mostly in the automotive market,” says Dudemaine. “We also have a team supporting our Autoware, AUTOSAR Classic Platform, and AUTOSAR Adaptive Platform offerings.”

Being able to offer safety-certified operating systems and platforms based on eMCOS or AUTOSAR means eSOL needs to provide a fully-tested standard programming API, which is where SuperTest comes in.

“Everyone expects the OS to be shipped with the C library, and sometimes the C++ library, so we need to make sure that the functionality of these libraries is fully tested in accordance with the latest Functional Safety (FuSa) methodology,” adds Dudemaine. “Even though we use the Arm platform and a functional safety qualified commercial Arm compiler with a set of pre-qualified C and C++ libraries, they don’t provide all the pieces we need. For example, what’s not included are things like malloc, parts of the C library and POSIX library that are OS dependent, and some additional headers that are related to our operating system APIs.”

Note that it’s not necessarily Arm’s responsibility to provide these parts, as they are OS-dependent. The Arm tool chain assumes that the operating-system or platform vendor will implement the remaining pieces.

eSOL’s eMCOS development team now runs SuperTest on each new release of eSOL’s operating systems to verify that the many OS APIs that SuperTest covers are functioning as expected. Here, SuperTest is used as a test suite for functional and coverage test as well as compliance, because OEMs expect to receive an operating system that’s fully tested and compliant. And as far as installation is concerned, getting SuperTest up and running is straightforward.

---

Marcel Beemster is the CTO and Co-Founder of Solid Sands B.V., located in Amsterdam, Netherlands. He has more than 25 years of experience in compiler technology and holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Amsterdam.