ABSTRACT:
The combination of a real-time executive and off-the-shelf
time-sharing operating systems has the potential of providing both
predictability and the comfort of a large application base. Isolation
between the components is required to protect the real-time subsystem
from a significant class of faults in the (ever-growing) time-sharing
operating systems but also to protect real-time applications from each
other. Recent commodity computer hardware significantly improved the
ability of these machines to support faithful virtualization. Virtual
machines provide the strong isolation required for security reasons.
But questions regarding the temporal isolation remain open. In this
paper we analyze how and to which degree recent x86 virtualization
extensions influence the interrupt-response times of a real-time
operating system hosting virtual machines.