FVM: Practical Feather-Weight Virtualization on Commodity Microcontrollers

IF 3.8 2区计算机科学 Q2 COMPUTER SCIENCE, HARDWARE & ARCHITECTURE

IEEE Transactions on Computers Pub Date : 2025-04-08 DOI:10.1109/TC.2025.3558582

Junchao Li;Runsheng Hou;Guangyong Shang;Huanle Zhang;Xiuzhen Cheng;Runyu Pan

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Recently, there has been an increasing drive to consolidate multiple microcontrollers into one physical entity, due to advantages in reducing overall costs, enhancing reliability, and simplifying hardware interconnections. To reduce consolidation engineering costs, minimizing system latency and memory footprint is important as well as maintaining compatibility with legacy software. In this paper, we propose a virtualization-based solution called Feather-weight Virtual Machine (FVM) that focuses on these goals. FVM enables low latency by specializing the virtualization model to Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOSes), achieves small footprint by adapting management policies to microcontroller memories, attains high compatibility by aligning with microcontroller ecosystem idiosyncrasies, finally allowing practical consolidation across a wide range of commodity microcontrollers. We implement and evaluate FVM on ARMv6-M, ARMv7-M, and RISC-V architectures with two toolchains and two RTOSes, and it can fit into 20 KiB of RAM with less than 5% latency bloat.

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商用微控制器上实用的轻量级虚拟化

最近，由于在降低总体成本、提高可靠性和简化硬件互连方面的优势，越来越多的人将多个微控制器整合到一个物理实体中。为了降低整合工程成本，最小化系统延迟和内存占用以及维护与遗留软件的兼容性非常重要。在本文中，我们提出了一种基于虚拟化的解决方案，称为轻量级虚拟机（Feather-weight Virtual Machine， FVM），专注于这些目标。FVM通过将虚拟化模型专门化到实时操作系统（rtos）来实现低延迟，通过调整管理策略以适应微控制器内存来实现小内存占用，通过与微控制器生态系统特性保持一致来实现高兼容性，最终允许在广泛的商品微控制器之间进行实际整合。我们使用两个工具链和两个rtos在ARMv6-M， ARMv7-M和RISC-V架构上实现和评估了FVM，它可以适应20kib的RAM，延迟膨胀小于5%。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

IEEE Transactions on Computers 工程技术-工程：电子与电气

CiteScore

6.60

自引率

5.40%

发文量

199

审稿时长

6.0 months

期刊介绍： The IEEE Transactions on Computers is a monthly publication with a wide distribution to researchers, developers, technical managers, and educators in the computer field. It publishes papers on research in areas of current interest to the readers. These areas include, but are not limited to, the following: a) computer organizations and architectures; b) operating systems, software systems, and communication protocols; c) real-time systems and embedded systems; d) digital devices, computer components, and interconnection networks; e) specification, design, prototyping, and testing methods and tools; f) performance, fault tolerance, reliability, security, and testability; g) case studies and experimental and theoretical evaluations; and h) new and important applications and trends.