Effects of dynamic isolation for full virtualized RTOS and GPOS guests

Abstract

Industrial systems currently include not only control processing with real-time operating system (RTOS) but also information processing with general-purpose operating system (GPOS). Multicore-based virtualization is an attractive option to provide consolidated environment when GPOS and RTOS are put in service on a single hardware platform. Researches on this technology have predominantly focused on the schedulability of RTOS virtual machines (VMs) by completely dedicated physical-CPUs (pCPUs) but have rarely considered parallelism or the throughput of the GPOS. However, it is also important that the multicore-based hypervisor adaptively selects pCPU assignment policy to efficiently manage resources in modern industrial systems. In this paper, we report our study on the effects of dynamic isolation when two mixed criticality systems are working on one platform. Based on our investigation of mutual interferences between RTOS VMs and GPOS VMs, we found explicit effects of dynamic isolation by special events. While maintaining low RTOS VMs scheduling latency, a hypervisor should manage pCPUs assignment by event-driven and threshold-based strategies to improve the throughput of GPOS VMs. Furthermore, we deal with implicit negative effects of dynamic isolation caused by the synchronization inside a GPOS VM, then propose a process of urgent boosting with dynamic isolation. All our methods are implemented in a real hypervisor, KVM. In experimental evaluation with benchmarks and an automotive digital cluster application, we analyzed that proposed dynamic isolation guarantees soft real-time operations for RTOS tasks while improving the throughput of GPOS tasks on a virtualized multicore system.