SPUMONE: Lightweight CPU Virtualization Layer for Embedded Systems

Abstract

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.

Enforcing dependable operations by model checking a visualization layer

“…There is an argument that D-Visor is such relatively small software that it can be made secure and trusted by code inspection and testing. This argument can be true for thin and simple implementations of D-Visor, such as SPUMONE [3]. Thorough code inspection and testing, however, become difficult as the size of software increases and the interactions between D-Visor and its guest OS become more complex.…”

Hardware-assisted virtualization targeting MIPS-based SoCs

“…SPUMONE. A virtualization layer that works with paravirtualized systems but claims to have small engineering cost in terms of needed modifications in the guest OS [18]. The solution provides the VCPU and the idea that multiple virtual processors can be associated with a single application domain.…”

A Lightweight Monitoring Service for Multi-core Embedded Systems

“…Figure 2 describes the prototype architecture. As said previously, our prototype system is based on a system lightweight virtualization layer named SPUMONE [6]. SPUMONE is a virtual machine monitor that targets embedded systems and has the particularity to let guest OSes run in kernel mode, in order to minimize its performance impact and ease the design of multi-system applications.…”