Title: Bare-metal microhypervisor prototype and measurement of real-time characteristics

Authors: Ivan Kolchin; Sergey Filippov

Addresses: Corporate Technology, Siemens LLC, Saint-Petersburg, Russian Federation ' Corporate Technology, Siemens LLC, Saint-Petersburg, Russian Federation

Abstract: Hypervisors and virtual machines have become very popular in recent decades owing to a number of indisputable advantages. But there is a dark side of this fact especially for industry companies which are engaged in development of safety-relevant systems. The software becomes too complicated and bloated to meet all possible versions and configurations of hardware. As a result it is difficult to certify it with compliance to safety standards such as IEC 61508. An attempt to go another way is undertaken in this research. The way is to develop a bare-metal hypervisor for a particular platform with a certain set of peripheral devices and thus to reduce lines of code significantly. This approach allows making the software faster and more reliable in exchange for flexibility. The hardware specific bare-metal microhypervisor has been developed from scratch for x86 quadcore CPU. It can run three real-time virtual machines on separated cores. The main achievements are just not above 10 k lines of code and simplicity.

Keywords: bare-metal software; bare-metal microhypervisors; real-time systems; safety-critical systems; symmetric multiprocessors; virtual machines; real-time characteristics; VT-d; VT-x; SMP; software development; hardware-specific microhypervisors.

DOI: 10.1504/IJES.2015.066137

International Journal of Embedded Systems, 2015 Vol.7 No.1, pp.1 - 10

Received: 12 Feb 2014
Accepted: 29 Mar 2014
Published online: 03 Dec 2014 *

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