Future ambient intelligence environments will embed powerful multi-core processors to compose various functionalities into a smaller number of hardware components. This makes the maintainability of intelligent environments better because it is not easy to manage massively distributed processors. A composition kernel makes it possible to compose multiple functionalities on a multi-core processor with the minimum modification of OS kernels and applications. A multi-core processor is a good candidate to compose various software developed independently for dedicated processors into one multi-core processor to reduce both the hardware and development cost. In this paper, we present SPUMONE which is a composition kernel for developing future smart products.

The recent increase in complexity and functionality in embedded systems makes them more vulnerable to rootkit-type attacks, raising the need for integrity management systems. However, as of today there is no such system that can guarantee the system's safety while matching the low-resource, real-time and multi-core requirements of embedded systems. In this paper, we present a Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) based monitoring service for embedded systems that checks the actual kernel data against a safe data specification. However, due to the VMM and multi-core nature of the system, the guest OS can be preempted at any time, leading to the checking of potentially inconsistent states. We evaluated two approaches to solve this problem: detecting such invalid states by checking specific kernel data, and detecting system calls using the VMM.

This article presents a new way to deploy and customize embedded virtual machine based operating systems for very restrained devices. Due to the specificity of restrained embedded devices (large usage of read-only memory, very few writable memory available, …), these systems are typically deployed off-board, in a process called romization . However, current romization solutions do not allow a complete deployment to take place outside of the execution device: they are capable of converting system components and applications into their executable form, but are unable to perform any operation that would require the system to be running. This results in a good part of the deployment being performed by the target device, at the cost of longer startup times, bloat with code and data that are only executed once at startup, and suboptimal memory placement of data structures. In this article, we propose a new romization scheme that allows the system to be started within a virtual execution environment, and thus to be fully deployed off-board before being transferred to its real execution support. We then take advantage of all the information provided by the deployed state in order to analyze and customize it, resulting in a very low-footprint, custom-tailored embedded system. The Java platform is used as a support to implement our romization architecture and perform our experiments. For the evaluated set of embedded applications, we were able to obtain embedded systems which memory footprint was lower than their J2ME counterpart, while being based on a full-fledged J2SE environment.

Device drivers are the major cause of operating system failure. Prior research proposed frameworks to improve the reliability of device drivers by means of driver restart. While avoiding any instrumentation of the driver, this approach does not always allow graceful recovery. In this paper, we propose a framework for self-healing device drivers that lets the driver developer consider and implement the failure recovery of device drivers. For this purpose, our framework provides easy to use and light-weight persistent memory that preserves the state of the driver needed to successfully recover. We developped a prototype on top of the L4 microkernel, and were able to achieve full recovery of crashed drivers as fast as 0.2 ms for different device drivers. In all cases, recovery was totally transparent for the user.