Virtio Front-End Network Driver for RTEMS Operating System

Virtualization technology can provide a transparent and efficient software development environment at the development phase of embedded systems. In addition, virtualization can be exploited to provide strong resource isolation between real-time applications. However, since virtualization incurs noticeable overheads, we need to minimize these to utilize virtualization technology for either a software development environment or a runtime environment of real-time embedded systems. In this letter, we particularly focus on virtualization overheads of network I/O and present an implementation of standardized (i.e., virtio) front-end network driver for a real-time operating system (RTOS). Although there have been several studies for virtio on general-purpose OS, our implementation is the first open-source virtio for an RTOS. The measurement results show that our implementation can improve the bandwidth and latency up to 168% and 52%, respectively. In addition, the memory usage can be saved up to 36%.