ARINC 653

ARINC 653 (Avionics Application Standard Software Interface) is a software specification for space and time partitioning in safety-critical avionics real-time operating systems (RTOS). It allows the hosting of multiple applications of different software levels on the same hardware in the context of an Integrated Modular Avionics architecture. ARINC 653 (Avionics Application Standard Software Interface) is a software specification for space and time partitioning in safety-critical avionics real-time operating systems (RTOS). It allows the hosting of multiple applications of different software levels on the same hardware in the context of an Integrated Modular Avionics architecture. It is part of ARINC 600-Series Standards for Digital Aircraft & Flight Simulators. In order to decouple the real-time operating system platform from the application software, ARINC 653 defines an API called APplication EXecutive (APEX). Each application software is called a partition and has its own memory space. It also has a dedicated time slot allocated by the APEX API. Within each partition, multitasking is allowed. The APEX API provides services to manage partitions, processes and timing, as well as partition/process communication and error handling. The partitioning environment can be implemented by using a hypervisor to map partitions to virtual machines, but this is not required. The current work of the AEEC APEX Subcommittee includes the enhancement of ARINC 653 for multicore processor architectures.