Integrating Linux and the real-time ERIKA OS through the Xen hypervisor

Abstract

Modern user interfaces grow more and more complex and cannot be possibly handled by the same software components in charge of the timely execution of safety-critical control tasks. Evidence Srl recently proposed a single-board dual-OS system aimed at combining the flexibility of the Linux general-purpose operating system, which is able to produce any complex user interface, and the reliability of the automotive-grade ERIKA Enterprise operating system, a small-footprint real-time OS suitable for safety-critical control tasks and able to execute commands triggered by Linux. The operating systems run on dedicated cores and, for efficiency reasons, they share memory with limited support for memory protection: although the system allows running two operating systems, from a safety certification point of view it suffers from the fact that safety-critical and non-safety-critical components should be isolated from each other. In this paper we present, as an improvement to the initial implementation, again a double-OS system running, on a dual-core platform, ERIKA Enterprise and a full-featured Linux OS, but using the Xen hypervisor to run the two operating systems in two isolated domains. In the proposed setup, each of the domains runs on a dedicated core, assigned statically by the hypervisor. Linux runs as the control domain, and is therefore able to execute any of the components of the Xen toolstack; it is also able to grant to the real-time operating system access to any I/O-memory range needed for control tasks. The described system also provides a simple, safe communication mechanism between the two operating systems, based on Xen's inter-domain event notification primitives and explicit sharing of a dedicated set of memory pages by the real-time operating system.