Real-time virtualization with Xvisor

Embedded virtualization has gained attention in recent years due to increasing usage of embedded systems in cyber-physical systems and the Industry 4.0 revolution. Especially in combination with multi-core embedded systems, virtualization reduces the number of embedded systems and simultaneously delivers a secure and separated environment in each virtualized system. Applications in such cyber-physical systems often require real- time guarantees with hard deadlines. To guarantee those real-time constraints in virtual- ization, both hypervisor and guest operating system must support real-time scheduling. Se- lecting the optimal scheduling algorithm on both scheduling levels is hard and is only opti- mal for the analysed application. Due to the multiple scheduling levels, a set of scheduling algorithm combinations must be analysed which is too costly without analysis on higher abstraction levels. By using an analysis methodology to find this optimal combination us- ing higher abstraction levels analysis, we reduce the set at every abstraction level. In this paper, we present a real-time hypervisor, based on Xvisor, for multi-core embedded sys- tems. We modified the hypervisor to support real-time scheduling and the compositional schedulability analysis and validated the analysis methodology using this embedded hy- pervisor.

Publication year:2020

Keywords:A1 Journal article

BOF-keylabel:yes

CSS-citation score:1

Authors from:Higher Education

Accessibility:Open