MCS-IOV: Real-Time I/O Virtualization for Mixed-Criticality Systems

In mixed-criticality systems, timely handling of I/O is a key for the system being successfully implemented and functioning appropriately. The criticality levels of functions and sometimes the whole system are often dependent on the state of the I/O. An I/O system for a MCS must provide simultaneously isolation/separation, performance/efficiency and timing-predictability, as well as being able to manage I/O resource in an adaptive manner to facilitate efficient yet safe resource sharing among components of different criticality levels. Existing approaches cannot achieve all of these requirements simultaneously. This paper presents a MCS I/O management framework, termed MCS-IOV. MCS-IOV is based on hardware assisted virtualisation, which provides temporal and spatial isolation and prohibits fault propagation with small extra overhead in performance. MCS-IOV extends a real-time I/O virtualisation system, by supporting the concept of mixed criticalities and customised interfaces for schedulers, which offers good timing-preditability. MCS-IOV supports I/O driven criticality mode switch (the mode switch can be triggered by detection of unexpected I/O behaviors, e.g., a higher I/O utilization than expected) and timely I/O resource reconfiguration up on that. Finally, We evaluated and demonstrate MCS-IOV in different aspects.