Enabling Strong Isolation for Distributed Real-Time Applications in Edge Computing Scenarios

Distributed coexisting applications found in the military and space domains, which operate over managed but shared computing resources at the edge require strong isolation from each other. The state of the art for computation sharing at the edge is traditionally based on Docker and similar pseudovirtualization features. Our team has been working on an end-to-end architecture that provides strong spatial and temporal isolation similar to what has become standard in avionics communities. In this paper, we describe an open-source extension to Linux that we have designed and implemented for our distributed real-time embedded managed systems (DREMS) architecture. The key concepts are the partitioning scheduler, strong security design, and a health management interface.