T-Visor: A Hypervisor for Mixed Criticality Embedded Real-time System with Hardware Virtualization Support

Abstract: Recently, embedded systems have not only requirements for hard real-time behavior and reliability, but also diversified functional demands, such as network functions. To satisfy these requirements, virtualization using hypervisors is promising for embedded systems. However, as most of existing hypervisors are designed for general-purpose information processing systems, they rely on large system stacks, so that they are not suitable for mixed criticality embedded real-time systems. Even in hypervisors designed for embedded systems, their schedulers do not consider the diversity of real-time requirements and rapid change in scheduling theory. We present the design and implementation of T-Visor, a hypervisor specialized for mixed criticality embedded real-time systems. T-Visor supports ARM architecture and realizes full virtualization using ARM Virtualization Extensions. To guarantee real-time behavior, T-Visor provides a flexible scheduling framework so that developers can select the most suitable scheduling algorithm for their systems. Our evaluation showed that it performed better compared to Xen/ARM. From these results, we conclude that our design and implementation are more suitable for embedded real-time systems than the existing hypervisors.