Title: The offline nanovisor

Authors: Raz Ben Yehuda; Nezer Jacob Zaidenberg

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland ' Department of Computer Science, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland

Abstract: Current real-time technologies for Linux require partitioning for running RTOS alongside Linux or extensive kernel patching. The offline nanovisor is a minimal real-time library OS in a lightweight hypervisor under Linux. We describe a nanovisor that executes in an offline processor. An offline processor is a processor core removed from the running operating system. The offline processor executes userspace code through the use of a hyplet. The hyplet is a nanovisor that allows the kernel to execute userspace programs without delays. Combining these two technologies offers a way to achieve hard real-time in standard Linux. We demonstrate high-speed access in various use cases using a userspace timer in frequencies up to 20 kHz, with a jitter of a few hundred nanoseconds. We performed this on a relatively slow ARM processor.

Keywords: hypervisor; real-time; ARM; virtualisation; embedded Linux.

DOI: 10.1504/IJES.2022.125430

International Journal of Embedded Systems, 2022 Vol.15 No.4, pp.289 - 299

Received: 16 Feb 2021
Accepted: 30 Dec 2021
Published online: 09 Sep 2022 *

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