Hardware support for resource partitioning in real-time embedded systems

Abstract

Today's embedded systems require multiple functions such as real-time control and information technology and integrating these functions on a multi-core processor is one effective solution. However, this increases overhead as it is necessary to partition resources in this approach to protect them. We developed hardware support called ExVisor/XVS to reduce the overhead of partitioning resources to achieve real-time characteristics. This features a physical address management module (PAM) that uses direct address translation by using a single level page table based on an embedded system's memory usage. We evaluated the overhead in a virtual machine's (VM) resource access through register transfer level (RTL) simulation and implementation on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), and it was only less than 5.6% compared with the resource access time by a single core processor.