Towards Hard Real-Time and Energy-Efficient Virtualization for Many-core Embedded Systems

In safety-critical computing systems, the I/O virtualization must simultaneously satisfy different requirements, including time-predictability, performance, and energy-efficiency. However, these requirements are challenging to achieve due to complex I/O access path and resource management at the sys...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIEEE transactions on computers Vol. 72; no. 1; pp. 1 - 14
Main Authors Jiang, Zhe, Yang, Kecheng, Ma, Yunfeng, Fisher, Nathan, Audsley, Neil, Dong, Zheng
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York IEEE 01.01.2023
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subjects
Algorithms
Computer architecture
Embedded systems
Energy efficiency
Energy management
Hardware
Hardware/Software Co-design
I/O Virtualization
Performance prediction
Preempting
Real time
Real-time systems
Resource management
Run time (computers)
Safety critical
Scalability
Schedulability
Scheduling
Software
Systems architecture
Virtual machine monitors
Virtualization
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Summary:In safety-critical computing systems, the I/O virtualization must simultaneously satisfy different requirements, including time-predictability, performance, and energy-efficiency. However, these requirements are challenging to achieve due to complex I/O access path and resource management at the system level, lack of support from preemptive scheduling at I/O hardware level, and missing an effective energy management method. In this paper, we propose a new framework, I/O-GUARD, which reconstructs the system architecture of I/O virtualization, bringing a dedicated hardware hypervisor to handle resource management throughout the system. The hypervisor improves system real-time performance by enabling preemptive scheduling in I/O virtualization with both analytical and experimental real-time guarantees. Furthermore, we also present a dedicated energy management unit to adjust I/O-GUARD 's dynamic energy using frequency scaling. Associated with that, a frequency identification algorithm is proposed to find the appropriate executing frequency at run-time. As shown in experiments, I/O-GUARD  simultaneously improves the predictability, performance and energy-efficiency compared to the state-of-the-art I/O virtualization.
ISSN:0018-9340
1557-9956
DOI:10.1109/TC.2022.3207115