Title: Challenges in partitioned systems based on hypervisor: XtratuM case
Authors: Alfons Crespo
Abstract:
The increase in processor power and the availability of multi-core systems have extended the possibilities of integrating different applications into the same hardware. Although the concept of Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) was developed for single-core platforms, the increasing importance of (heterogeneous) multi-core platforms provides additional relevant value to this approach. In this line, researchers and industry are making significant efforts to analyse and exploit the capabilities of these platforms taking into account their advantages and limitations. Greater performance increased computing power, and stricter cost-containment is counteracted by the difficulty of computing exact execution time due to the effects of shared resources on code execution. Other sectors, such as space, railway, automobile, industry & IoT, etc., are also using partitioned systems.
Partitioned systems based on hypervisor allow guaranteeing the fault isolation by enforcing the temporal and spatial partitioning of the system and increasing the security and confidentiality of the applications.
The XtratuM hypervisor is a bare-metal hypervisor for embedded real-time systems that have been used in several EU projects and is currently being used on several space missions. Initially developed for LEON processors, it has been adapted to other platforms such as ARM Cortex R4/R5, A9 and PowerPC.
XtratuM has incorporated technologies such as MMU, multi-core, heterogeneous platforms, networked systems, application execution control, hardware virtualization support, etc., which has allowed it to be a reference hypervisor. Several applications with different levels of criticality and using different resources (guestOS) can coexist managed by the hypervisor.
This presentation will detail the evolution of Xtratum, the application fields and scenarios and the main issues to address the new challenges.
