Supporting virtualization standard for network devices in RTEMS real-time operating system

Abstract

The virtualization technology is attractive for modern embedded systems in that it can ideally implement resource partitioning but also can provide transparent software development environments. Although hardware emulation overheads for virtualization have been reduced significantly, the network I/O performance in virtual machine is still not satisfactory. It is very critical to minimize the virtualization overheads especially in real-time embedded systems, because the overheads can change the timing behavior of real-time applications. To resolve this issue, we aim to design and implement the device driver of the standardized virtual network device, called virtio, over RTEMS real-time operating system. Our virtio device driver can be portable across different Virtual Machine Monitors (VMMs) because our implementation is compliant with the standard. The measurement results clearly show that our virtio can achieve comparable performance to the virtio implemented in Linux while reducing memory consumption for network buffers.