Archive
Dynamic Memory Allocation in Critical Embedded Systems
Today I’m going to talk about why dynamic memory allocation is rarely used in critical embedded systems, and whether using only static allocation is a necessary restriction. I’m going to assume that maintaining system availability is critical, that there are hard real-time deadlines to be met, and that the system is long-running. Read more…
Verifying pointer arithmetic
Today I’ll look at whether code that uses pointer arithmetic is any harder to verify than equivalent code that does not use pointer arithmetic.
Consider this function for copying an array (or part of an array) into another array (or part of another array):
void arrayCopy(const int* src, int* dst, size_t num) {
size_t i;
for (i = 0; i < num; ++i) {
dst[i] = src[i];
}
}
Run-time checks: Are they worth it?
One of the criticisms levelled against the use of C in safety-critical software is that the C language does not provide run-time checks automatically. For example, when indexing into an array, there is no check that the index is in bounds. Likewise, when doing integer arithmetic in C, there is no check for arithmetic overflow. Read more…
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