Real-hardware evaluation of RealmEye on OpenCCA

Conduct a real-hardware port and performance evaluation of RealmEye on OpenCCA to measure absolute VMI latencies, the relative costs of SMC world switches and the KVM path, and Stage-2 TLB-invalidation overhead that cannot be captured by the Arm FVP.

Background

The evaluation of RealmEye is performed on the Arm Fixed Virtual Platform with cache, TLB, and pipeline behavior disabled or not modeled. Consequently, the reported instruction-level cycle counts do not establish absolute performance on physical Arm hardware, particularly for virtual-address translation, SMC world switches, KVM interactions, and Stage-2 TLB invalidation.

OpenCCA offers a possible evaluation platform by porting the CCA execution model to commodity Armv8.2 boards. However, OpenCCA emulates CCA security mechanisms in software and therefore would support performance measurement and functional validation rather than a security evaluation equivalent to genuine CCA hardware. The unresolved task is to port RealmEye to OpenCCA and use it to obtain more representative real-hardware performance measurements.