VOSySmonitoRV: a mixed-criticality solution on Linux-capable RISC-V platforms
This addresses the problem of running real-time applications alongside rich OSes in mixed-criticality environments like automotive and drones, specifically for RISC-V platforms, representing an incremental improvement by adapting existing virtualization concepts to a new architecture.
The paper tackles the lack of hardware virtualization extensions in RISC-V for mixed-criticality systems by proposing VOSySmonitoRV, a solution enabling secure co-execution of multiple operating systems, with performance assessed through benchmarks measuring interrupt latency and context switch time.
Embedded systems are pervasively used in many fields nowadays. In mixed-criticality environments (automotive, industry 4.0, drones, etc.) they need to run real-time applications with certain time and safety constraints alongside a rich operating system (OS). This is usually possible thanks to virtualization techniques, that leverage on hardware virtualization extensions on the machine. However, these hardware extensions might not cope with the security and safety requirements of the specific use case, and additionally, they might not always be available. A notable example is the emerging RISC-V architecture, that is today gaining a lot of traction in the mixed criticality field, but that do not offer today hardware virtualization extensions. In this paper VOSySmonitoRV is proposed as a mixed-criticality solution for RISC-V systems. VOSySmonitoRVallows the co-execution of two or more operating systems in a secure and isolated manner by running in the highest privileged machine level. A specific benchmark, measuring the interrupt latency and context switch time is done to assess the system performance in mixed criticality systems.