RTS hypervisor qualification for real-time systems

Abstract

Virtualization is a synonym for the server and cloud computing arena. Recently, it started to be also applied to real-time embedded systems with timing constraints. However, virtualization products for data centers and desktop computing cannot be readily applied to embedded systems because of differences in requirements, use cases, and computer architecture. Bridging the gap between virtualization and real-time requirements imposes the need of real-time virtualization products. Therefore, some embedded software manufacturers have built several real-time hypervisors specialized for embedded systems. Currently, there are several commercial ones such as Greenhills INTEGRITY MultiVisor, Real-Time Systems (RTS) GmbH Hypervisor, Tenasys eVM for Windows, National Instruments Real-Time Hyper Hypervisor, and some others. This paper provides the behavior and performance results of evaluating RTS hypervisor and gives advices of its use for soft or hard real-time embedded systems.