X86 System Management Mode (SMM) Evaluation for Mixed Critical Systems

Abstract

As autonomous driving, industry 4.0, smart cities, etc. become very popular, safety relevant computing is demanding high performance processors to manage an increasing number of sensors, actuators and control units. In this context, safety critical environments (typically run by real time operating systems) have to co-exist with one or multiple functional rich environments, e.g., Linux. Existing virtualization technologies today are considered not secure enough to isolate these two execution environment types. For this reason this paper evaluates x86 System Management Mode (SMM) as a technology for building mixed critical virtualization solutions. Considering them as key performance indicators, interrupt context switch and the minimal round trip time overheads have been measured. The obtained results on an Intel platform of respectively 1.39 \(\upmu \)s and 12.73 \(\upmu \)s, confirm a high potential for SMM. At the best of our knowledge, this is the first work considering SMM as possible solution for mixed critical environments.