Satellite Avionics Fault Tolerant Hypervisor

Hypervisors could significantly increase mission utility and life of space platforms, while decreasing acquisition time and cost. Terrestrial hypervisor applications, including cloud computing and avionics for Unmanned Aerial Systems, enjoy the benefits of maintenance, short-duration missions, and vastly lower acquisition and replacement costs. As such, they have limited need and ability to detect and handle run-time faults in the underlying hardware and their data structures. By comparison, long duration space-based missions operate in harsh radiation environments, where maintenance is not an option, yet transient and permanent failures can and do happen. Historically, this has been dealt with by expensive radiation-hardened systems with highly constrained, highly tested runtimes, operating systems, applications, and payloads. Hypervisors could change the space computing paradigm, by enabling reconfigurability and migration of legacy applications to more modern processing platforms. However, without significant attention to the harsh fault environment of space, that utility will be severely limited. Hardware faults from Single Event Effects (SEEs) can cause hypervisors to fail in unintended ways, which can lead to corruption and unacceptable violation of partition boundaries. SAFTHY will detect hypervisor-specific errors due to transient and permanent SEEs in a space-based environment, support autonomous fault management, and provide remote integrity attestation.