Integrating Linux and the real-time ERIKA OS through the Xen hypervisor

Abstract

Modern user interfaces grow more and more complex and cannot be possibly handled by the same software components in charge of the timely execution of safety-critical control tasks. Evidence Srl recently proposed a single-board dual-OS system aimed at combining the flexibility of the Linux general-purpose operating system, which is able to produce any complex user interface, and the reliability of the automotive-grade ERIKA Enterprise operating system, a small-footprint real-time OS suitable for safety-critical control tasks and able to execute commands triggered by Linux. The operating systems run on dedicated cores and, for efficiency reasons, they share memory with limited support for memory protection: although the system allows running two operating systems, from a safety certification point of view it suffers from the fact that safety-critical and non-safety-critical components should be isolated from each other. In this paper we present, as an improvement to the initial implementation, again a double-OS system running, on a dual-core platform, ERIKA Enterprise and a full-featured Linux OS, but using the Xen hypervisor to run the two operating systems in two isolated domains. In the proposed setup, each of the domains runs on a dedicated core, assigned statically by the hypervisor. Linux runs as the control domain, and is therefore able to execute any of the components of the Xen toolstack; it is also able to grant to the real-time operating system access to any I/O-memory range needed for control tasks. The described system also provides a simple, safe communication mechanism between the two operating systems, based on Xen's inter-domain event notification primitives and explicit sharing of a dedicated set of memory pages by the real-time operating system

A Comprehensive Survey on the Use of Hypervisors in Safety-Critical Systems

“…Xen on ARM has also been used to integrate Linux with a real-time operating system such as ERIKA OS, which obtained the OSEK-VDX certification for automotive applications, on the same platform [64]. However, this option still has many limitations in terms of certification: the deployment architecture is very specific (a dual-core platform in which each OS runs on a different core) and ERIKA OS can run only as a guest domU, so it depends entirely on the privileged domain dom0, which runs a general-purpose Linux.…”

An Empirical Study on System Level Aspects of Internet of Things (IoT)

“…One of the essential features of this RTOS is the sharing of the stack between different tasks; this increases the efficient utilization of the memory by eradicating the use of dedicated stack for individual tasks. The use of RT-Druit with the eclipse plugin allows programmers to develop the graphical user interfaces [329].…”

Vertical integration in industrial enterprises and distributed middleware

“…Such a merger between these two technologies has already been proposed and explored for time-critical applications in the automotive, mobile communications, industrial, and other domains (Gu and Zhao, 2012;Bregenzer and Adämmer, 2010). Consequently, several solutions for the paravirtualisation and full virtualisation of RTOS systems, such as Seehwan Yoo and Yoo (2014) and Avanzini et al (2015), respectively, have already been proposed and validated experimentally. The opportunity therefore exists to build upon the same technologies in order to allow for any single element of a distributed middleware system to dynamically provide for the very nature of mixed criticality that is typical of industrial enterprises.…”