Recently, the engineering cost of embedded systems is rapidly increasing due to growing sophistication of services. To deal with the problem, hybrid operating system environments have been proposed. This enables to run a RTOS and a general purpose OS concurrently and to reuse software resources on both of them. This approach is efficient in reducing engineering costs. We reconfigured the requirement for these hybrid operating system environment and build a new architecture which fulfills these requirements by using virtualization techniques. Our system provides the facilities to build multiple operating system environment easily. There are two contributions in our systems. One is that the modification cost of the guest OS is small. The second contribution is improvement in system availability by enabling guest OS to reboot independently. Although we used virtualization layer to construct a hybrid operating system environment, the performance overhead is considering small. Therefor our approach is very practical and efficient for recent sophisticated embedded systems.

Abstract. Constructing an embedded device with a real-time and a general-purpose operating system has attracted attention as a promising approach to let the device balance real-time responsiveness and rich functionalities. This paper introduces our methodology for constructing such multi-OS platform with minimal engineering cost by assuming asymmetric OS combinations unique to embedded systems. Our methodology consists of two parts. One is a simple hypervisor for multiplexing resources to be shared between operating systems. The other is modifying operating systems to allow them to be aware of each other. We constructed an experimental system executing TOPPERS and Linux simultaneously on a hardware equipped with an SH-4A processor. The modification to each operating system kernel limited to a few dozen lines of code and do not introduce any overhead that would compromise real-time responsiveness or system throughput.

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