This paper presents SPHERE, a project aimed at the realization of an integrated framework to abstract the hardware complexity of interconnected, modern system-on-chips (SoC) and simplify the management of their heterogeneous computational resources. The SPHERE framework leverages hypervisor technology to virtualize computational resources and isolate the behavior of different subsystems running on the same platform, while providing safety, security, and real-time communication mechanisms. The main challenges addressed by SPHERE are discussed in the paper along with a set of new technologies developed in the context of the project. They include isolation mechanisms for mixed-criticality applications, predictable I/O virtualization, the management of time-sensitive networks with heterogeneous traffic flows, and the management of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) to provide efficient implementations for cryptography modules, as well as hardware acceleration for deep neural networks. The SPHERE architecture is validated through an autonomous driving use-case.INDEX TERMS cyber-physical systems, embedded systems, real-time systems, hypervisor, FPGA.
Modern applications are often characterized by a tight interaction with I/O devices. At the same time, many application domains are also facing a shift towards an integrated approach where multiple applications with mixed levels of safety and security need to co-exist on top of a shared hardware platform, which is typically managed by a hypervisor. This gives rise to the need for a predictable mechanism allowing multiple virtual machines to share I/O devices, while at the same time controlling contention delays when they access global memory.To deal with these shortcomings, this paper proposes an I/O virtualization framework providing support for controlling the I/O-related memory contention by leveraging the ARM QoS-400 regulators. Extensive experiments are performed to compare the proposed solution with the Xen hypervisor, showing improvements up to 8x when controlling the I/O-related memory contention.
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