Testing the limits of general-purpose hypervisors for real-time control systems

Abstract

With the emergence of the Industry 4.0 paradigm, there is a need to introduce a significant degree of flexibility, security and resilience in automation infrastructures, while keeping up with real-time requirements that are characteristic of such domains. Interestingly, many of these driving principles are the same that encouraged the adoption of virtualization technologies on the IT domain, somehow suggesting that the same benefits could be realisable for Industrial and Automation Control Systems, allowing to virtualise servers and cyber–physical system control devices. However, the suitability of using off-the-shelf hypervisor technologies to address the specific real-time requirements of automation infrastructures remains unclear, due to their focus on maximising systems throughput and capacity, often at the expense of determinism and increased latency.This work addresses this problem, presenting a discussion and an empirical evaluation on the feasibility of using general purpose off-the-shelf hypervisors to virtualise cyber–physical systems’ servers and control devices. While the evaluation concludes that some of these hypervisors are already capable of dealing with typical real-time workloads, this cannot be generalised to all types of real-time systems.