QFabric: Guarded Cross-Domain Task Recovery and Its Limits on a Linux-RTOS Board

Abstract

Heterogeneous embedded boards pair a Linux application processor with a real-time microcontroller (MCU), which suggests moving a task between the two domains when its timing degrades. We present QFabric, a prototype that treats cross-domain placement as guarded recovery from a violated empirical soft real-time contract: a bounded task is compiled for both domains, monitored in windows with hysteresis, switched only after semantic and capacity admission at a quiescent epoch boundary, and committed or rolled back after probation. On an Arduino UNO Q (Cortex-A53 Linux and a Cortex-M33 running Zephyr), we characterize the stock Bridge RPC interconnect and measure five workloads in both domains under idle, CPU-load, and higher-priority SCHED_FIFO contention, with ordinary and real-time callers. Each MCU invocation costs about 19 ms of dispatch regardless of compute, the MCU runs the heaviest kernel 34x slower, and because every call traverses Linux userspace, Linux contention inflates the MCU path far more than the Linux path (p99 up to 400 ms versus 17.0 ms). Across 30 cells of a four-node chain, Linux meets every contract within 0.8% misses and QFabric correctly never migrates; a controller without hysteresis migrates in 7 cells, raising p95 by up to 177x, and probation rolls back 5 of those moves. On Linux-dispatched heterogeneous boards, migration therefore cannot isolate a task from Linux interference, and recovery guards matter chiefly by preventing harmful moves. This paper supersedes an earlier artifact release whose reported improvement arose from measurement defects that we identify. All source, raw traces, and generators are public.