Empirical Study of Real-Time Hypervisors for Industrial Systems

Latest developments in virtualization technologies made it useful for a large selection of general purposes solutions to be integrated easily in multiple platforms. This technology is used for data centers in order to reduce cost, space and power which are the reasons why this technology is successful. Various markets are currently assessing the utilization of virtualization technology for hosting their services and infrastructures. Virtualization performances and innovations have significantly in terms of performances over the last couple of years. At the same time it still faces some challenges regarding performances for real-time applications. Xen is a well-known open-source type 1 hypervisor, which is the reason why it was used in this experiment. Another bare metal hypervisor called XtratuM will be used to explore the characteristics of the ARINC 653 scheduler. Performances of applications are influenced by the scheduling and network I/O tasks. The main contribution of this paper is that it compares the performances of real time schedulers of these two hypervisors; it also presents data performances of these schedulers on two different architectures, on an x86 based processor and also on ARM processors.