BlueVisor: A Scalable Real-Time Hardware Hypervisor for Many-Core Embedded Systems

Virtualization technology is widespread in real-time embedded systems, resulting from the availability of hardware support. Hardware assistance allows the penalties suffered by traditional software virtualization technologies to be alleviated, e.g., significant software overhead. However, current technologies are not necessarily applicable to real-time systems as they are not designed to satisfy strict timing requirements and constraints. In this paper, we propose a scalable real-time hardware hypervisor for many-core embedded system, named BlueVisor, developed from our previously proposed real-time I/O hypervisor (VCDC), I/O controller (GPIOCP) and memory interconnect (BlueTree), which enables predictable CPU, memory, and I/O virtualization, as well as fast interrupt handler, and inter-VM communication. We propose the design idea and specific implementation of the real-time hypervisor, as well as demonstrate how a BlueVisor-based virtualization system can be adequately exploited to meet the real-time requirements with significant improvements on system performance, while presenting a low performance cost executing different operating systems (OSs).