Embedded Systems Issues and Prevention Questions

Covers common reliability, stability, and correctness problems unique to embedded and resource constrained systems and how to prevent or detect them. Topics include memory problems such as stack overflow, heap fragmentation, and memory leaks; concurrency and timing issues such as race conditions, priority inversion, interrupt storms, and real time scheduling pitfalls; hardware related failures such as watchdog resets, brownout and power sequencing problems, electromagnetic interference and signal integrity concerns; and environment driven failures such as thermal and supply issues. Candidates should understand defensive programming and design practices for embedded targets including static allocation strategies, bounds checking, use of safe coding guidelines, static analysis and MISRA style rules, careful interrupt and driver design, priority inheritance or other inversion mitigation, watchdog configuration, debouncing and rate limiting, and EMI and power filtering techniques. Include diagnostic and validation approaches such as hardware bring up methods, use of JTAG and trace, logic analyzers and oscilloscopes, on device logging and telemetry, fault injection and stress testing, postmortem analysis and built in self test. Emphasize trade offs between performance, determinism, safety, and resource constraints and how design decisions affect failure modes and prevention strategies.