Handling mixed criticality on embedded multi-core systems

This talk illustrates how to use the Jailhouse hypervisor for running Linux alongside an RTOS on modern ARM multi-core SoCs, aiming at building smarter devices for the automotive market.

Recently, the industry has shown a growing interest for executing activities with different levels of criticality on the same multi-core SoC. These could consist, for example, of non-critical activities (e.g., monitoring, logging, human-machine intefaces) together with safety-critical tasks. The rationale behind this interest is the continuous need for reducing the time-to-market as well as the design and hardware costs. This is particularly suitable for the automotive market, where new infotainment functionalities might be coupled with traditional safety-critical tasks (e.g. engine/brake control). In this talk, we will present our experience (grown through the HERCULES EU project) in using the Jailhouse hypervisor for executing the Linux general-purpose OS alongside an automotive RTOS on modern ARM multi-core platforms. Besides providing useful instructions for using Jailhouse, we will illustrate a library designed for easing the communication between the two OSs as well as some mechanism for limiting the interference on shared hardware resources. Finally, a short video of a simple demo will show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.