Regularity-Based Virtualization Under the ARINC 653 Standard for Embedded Systems

Abstract

In embedded real-time virtualized systems (ERTVS), the ARINC 653 standard specifies a cyclic scheduling policy to guarantee the real-time performance of tasks in multiple Virtual Machines (VMs) residing on shared hardware. Based on this policy, the Regularity-based Resource Partitioning (RRP) model defines an efficient interface specification to hierarchically partition and assign resource slices among VMs. Although this model has received plenty of attention recently, three major pieces remain missing for applying this model in ERTVS. (1) Embedded systems are more sensitive to resource utilization efficiency since this may drastically affect their deployment cost for including additional cores. Therefore, this paper proposes an optimal and an approximate RRP resource scheduler for multi-core platforms. (2) A resource reconfiguration is required when an embedded system has to switch between operating modes, resulting in the current cyclic schedule being replaced by another pre-configured and verified cyclic schedule. This paper formalizes a new One-Hop Reconfiguration (OHR) problem tailored for mode-switch-capable embedded systems and introduces a corresponding optimal solution. (3) No RRP-based toolset is currently available for embedded systems. This paper thus presents an optimized RRP toolset tailored for embedded systems. Numerous experiments are conducted to evaluate the efficacy of this toolset.