Real-Time Virtual Machines with Linux and kvm

This talk describes how to use some available technologies (the SCHED_DEADLINE scheduling policy, the PREEMPT_RT patchset, etc…) to execute real-time applications in kvm-based virtual machines while still providing performance guarantees to the virtualized applications.

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in supporting virtualized services even in embedded and real-time systems. However, executing real-time applications (characterized by temporal constraints) in virtual machines is not straightforward and presents some non-trivial challenges. This talk will describe how to use some technologies already available in the Linux kernel (the SCHED_DEADLINE scheduling policy, the PREEMPT_RT patchset, etc…) to execute real-time applications in kvm-based virtual machines while still providing performance guarantees to the virtualized applications. After presenting the problem (and providing a quick summary about real-time scheduling), it will be shown how to configure the host and guest kernels and the virtual machine, and how to schedule the VM threads in order to achieve predictable response times and to provide real-time guarantees.