26 research outputs found
Paravirtualizing Linux in a real-time hypervisor
International audienceThis paper describes a new hypervisor built to run Linux in a virtual machine. This hypervisor is built inside Anaxagoros, a real-time microkernel designed to execute safely hard real-time and non real-time tasks. This allows the execution of hard real-time tasks in parallel with Linux virtual machines without interfering with the execution of the real-time tasks. We implemented this hypervisor and compared performances with other virtualization techniques. Our hypervisor does not yet provide high performance but gives correct results and we believe the design is solid enough to guarantee solid performances with its future implementation
Reducing the complexity of virtual machine networking
Virtualization is an enabling technology that improves scalability, reliability, and flexibility. Virtualized networking is tackled by emulating or paravirtualizing network interface cards. This approach, however, leads to complexities (implementation and management) and has to conform to some limitations imposed by the Ethernet standard. RINA turns the current approach to virtualized networking on its head: instead of emulating networks to perform inter-process communication on a single processing system, it sees networking as an extension to local inter-process communication. In this article, we show how RINA can leverage a paravirtualization approach to achieve a more manageable solution for virtualized networking. We also present experimental results performed on IRATI, the reference open source implementation of RINA, which shows the potential performance that can be achieved by deploying our solution
Advancing Deductive Program-Level Verification for Real-World Application: Lessons Learned from an Industrial Case Study
This thesis is concerned with practicability of deductive program verification on source code level. As part of a case study for the verification of real-world software, the specification and verification approach to show correctness of the virtualizing kernel PikeOS is presented. Issues within the verification process using current tools and methodologies are discussed and several aspects of these problems are then addressed in detail to improve the verification process and tool usability
Ada real-time services and virtualization
Virtualization techniques have received increased attention in the field of embedded real-time systems. Such techniques provide a set of virtual machines that run on a single hardware platform, thus allowing several application programs to be executed as though they were running on separate machines, with isolated memory spaces and a fraction of the real processor time available to each of them.This papers deals with some problems that arise when implementing real-time systems written in Ada on a virtual machine. The effects of virtualization on the performance of the Ada real-time services are analysed, and requirements for the virtualization layer are derived. Virtual-machine time services are also defined in order to properly support Ada real-time applications. The implementation of the ORK+ kernel on the XtratuM supervisor is used as an example
Applying Hypervisor-Based Fault Tolerance Techniques to Safety-Critical Embedded Systems
This document details the work conducted through the development of this thesis, and it
is structured as follows:
• Chapter 1, Introduction, has briefly presented the motivation, objectives, and contributions
of this thesis.
• Chapter 2, Fundamentals, exposes a series of concepts that are necessary to correctly
understand the information presented in the rest of the thesis, such as the
concepts of virtualization, hypervisors, or software-based fault tolerance. In addition,
this chapter includes an exhaustive review and comparison between the different
hypervisors used in scientific studies dealing with safety-critical systems, and a
brief review of some works that try to improve fault tolerance in the hypervisor itself,
an area of research that is outside the scope of this work, but that complements
the mechanism presented and could be established as a line of future work.
• Chapter 3, Problem Statement and Related Work, explains the main reasons why
the concept of Hypervisor-Based Fault Tolerance was born and reviews the main
articles and research papers on the subject. This review includes both papers related
to safety-critical embedded systems (such as the research carried out in this thesis)
and papers related to cloud servers and cluster computing that, although not directly
applicable to embedded systems, may raise useful concepts that make our solution
more complete or allow us to establish future lines of work.
• Chapter 4, Proposed Solution, begins with a brief comparison of the work presented
in Chapter 3 to establish the requirements that our solution must meet in order to
be as complete and innovative as possible. It then sets out the architecture of the
proposed solution and explains in detail the two main elements of the solution: the
Voter and the Health Monitoring partition.
• Chapter 5, Prototype, explains in detail the prototyping of the proposed solution,
including the choice of the hypervisor, the processing board, and the critical functionality
to be redundant. With respect to the voter, it includes prototypes for both
the software version (the voter is implemented in a virtual machine) and the hardware
version (the voter is implemented as IP cores on the FPGA).
• Chapter 6, Evaluation, includes the evaluation of the prototype developed in Chapter
5. As a preliminary step and given that there is no evidence in this regard, an
exercise is carried out to measure the overhead involved in using the XtratuM hypervisor
versus not using it. Subsequently, qualitative tests are carried out to check that
Health Monitoring is working as expected and a fault injection campaign is carried
out to check the error detection and correction rate of our solution. Finally, a comparison
is made between the performance of the hardware and software versions of
Voter.
• Chapter 7, Conclusions and Future Work, is dedicated to collect the conclusions
obtained and the contributions made during the research (in the form of articles in
journals, conferences and contributions to projects and proposals in the industry).
In addition, it establishes some lines of future work that could complete and extend
the research carried out during this doctoral thesis.Programa de Doctorado en Ciencia y TecnologĂa Informática por la Universidad Carlos III de MadridPresidente: Katzalin Olcoz Herrero.- Secretario: FĂ©lix GarcĂa Carballeira.- Vocal: Santiago RodrĂguez de la Fuent