Real-Time Scheduling for Xen-ARM Virtual Machines

This paper investigates the feasibility of real-time scheduling with mobile hypervisor, Xen-ARM. Particularly for mobile virtual machines, real-time support is in high demand. However, it is difficult to guarantee real-time scheduling with virtual machines because inter-VM and intra-VM schedulability have to be determined in multi-OS environments. To address the schedulability, first, this paper presents a definition of a real-time virtual machine. Second, this paper analyzes intra-VM schedulability, taking quantization overhead into account. Quantization overhead comes from tick-based scheduling of Xen-ARM, which requires integer presentation of scheduling period and execution slice. Third, to minimize quantization overhead, this paper provides a new algorithm, called SH-quantization that provides accurate and efficient parameterization of a real-time virtual machine. Fourth, this paper presents an inter-VM schedulability test for incorporating multiple real-time virtual machines. To evaluate the approach, we implement the SH-quantization algorithm in Xen-ARM and paravirtualize a real-time OS, called xeno-μC/OS-II. We ran extensive experiments with various configurations of real-time tasks on a real hardware platform in order to characterize the scheduling behavior of real-time virtual machine with quantization. The results show that quantization overhead consumes additional CPU bandwidth up to 90% and the proposed algorithm guarantees intra/inter-VM schedulability with minimal CPU bandwidth.