Programmable temporal isolation in real-time and embedded execution environments

Abstract

We begin this paper with a wish list of features that we feel a modern real-time and embedded execution environment should offer. We then look at some of the key weaknesses of conventional real-time operating systems (RTOS) and limitations of virtual execution environments (VEE), which typically offer some of the features but not all in one system. We propose to remedy the problem by carefully combining, in a single virtualized execution environment, well-known operating systems and virtualization techniques with an efficient real-time scheduler, which we have recently developed. The scheduler enables temporal isolation of concurrently executing processes and allows to change guaranteed process execution speeds efficiently at any time during execution. We also report on preliminary experiments with a prototypical bare-metal implementation.