Use of Xtratum in an Automotive Application (*)

Use of XtratuM in an Automotive Application (*) J. Sánchez , S. Peiró, A. Crespo, J. Simó, M. Masmano, P. Balbastre Instituto de Automatica e Informatica Industrial Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Spain jsanchez,mmasmano,speiro @ai2.upv.es, jsimo,acrespo,patricia disca.upv.es { } { } Abstract the paravirtualization technique, which means that Virtualization is playing a key role in many of software running on top of it must be modified in today software systems. At first used mainly to order to interact with the hypervisor and not with improve resource utilization, this technology is ex- the underlying hardware. Therefore, virtualization panding and has reached the market of embedded support cannot be limited to creating virtual ma- systems. In this scope, XtratuM o↵ers a virtual- chines but it has to be extended to provide support ization solution capable of running mixed-purpose for any run-time environment wanted to be run over applications. This paper presents the key contribu- XtratuM. tions to the OVERSEE project, whose architecture depends on the availability of this technology. This project has the goal of o↵ering an appropriate infrastructure for the information technology systems of the upcoming smart vehicles. 1 Introduction The OVERSEE project [2] aims to provide a de- pendable and secure infrastructure for the execu- tion of mixed criticality applications on automotive systems. To meet this challenge, an architecture Figure 1: OVERSEE architecture overview. based on virtualization has been selected. XtratuM [1] o↵ers an ideal foundation for enforcing a strong Ultimately, this project has pushed forward the level of isolation, both temporal and spatial, thus cloud of available facilities in order to face the de- ensuring that vehicle functionality and safety can- sign of a XtratuM-based system. The most inter- not be harmed by any OVERSEE application. esting developments are presented in this paper, It is worth to mention that this project uses which are those related with run-time environment the Common Criteria Separation Kernel Protec- support (mainly Linux), a new technique intro- tion Profile [3], which considers virtualization as duced to allow dynamic scheduling over XtratuM a main technique to achieve a high level of robust- and a novel device virtualization layer based on the ness and data protection. Therefore, the benefits use of an I/O server partition. of virtualization in OVERSEE are reflected in two aspects, namely, to enforce rules for authorized information flows between virtual machines and to 2 Virtualization Layer ensure a strong temporal isolation capable of running critical real-time applications. The hypervisor abstracts the hardware and o↵ers XtratuM o↵ers a virtualization layer very close a software interface in order to create several vir- to the native hardware. This hypervisor relies on tual machines. Each of this virtual machines will (*) This work has been partially granted by the project COBAMI: DPI2011-28507-C02-02 1 be referred to as a partition. Each partition is run missions, known as Spare Host. spatial and temporarily isolated from each other, In order to be scheduled in spare time, the par- hence the term partition is very convenient to de- titions must send to the Spare Host a measure of pict this very fact. the CPU utilization. For this project, the Linux The selected processor for this project has been kernel has been patched in order to implement a an Intel Atom Z530 single core 1.6 GHz. XtratuM method of measuring CPU usage. Linux provides for x86 architecture has been taken as a starting a measure of CPU which is based on an unreliable point, so the main e↵orts in the OVERSEE project method; each time the kernel receives an interrupt have been focused on providing a good support for it logs which was the interrupted context to estab- paravirtualization implementation. Linux is an in- lish the CPU utilization. However, this method is creasingly popular solution for embedded systems, not exact and has been avoided in OVERSEE. In- so it’s been the primary target of the paravirtu- stead, the Linux kernel scheduler has been patched alization e↵orts. Thanks to the Xen group, the to have an exact measure of CPU utilization. Linux kernel provides an interface, which simpli- In order the hypervisor to decide which partition fies enormously the task of porting the kernel to a is to be scheduled next a list known as spare plan hypervisor, known as paravirt-ops. is used. This list contains pairs partition,duration Implementing the full set of paravirt-ops is only that inform the hypervisor how it should sched- half way to provide a running virtualized environ- ule the partitions inside the defined slots of the ment. The privilege levels of the segments need cyclic plan. The spare plan is calculated by the be modified, as well as several other patches inside spare host using whatever policy is considered con- the kernel as, for example, those regarding the In- venient. Hence, the architecture of the dynamic terrupt Descriptor Table (IDT) entry points. scheduling facility can be divided in two layers. The lowermost and closest to the hypervisor layer that takes the spare plan and performs the context 3 Dynamic Scheduling switches, and the uppermost layer taking political decisions about which partition is to be scheduled. In order to ensure a strong temporal isolation, In summary, the current available policy of the the scheduler relies on a cyclic plan statically de- spare plan is designed for maximizing CPU usage, fined. Besides providing a predictable behaviour, but other policies could be implemented as well. this scheduling technique has a counterpart which is the lack of flexibility. Hard real-time applications benefit from this fact, but non real-time con- 4 Device virtualization strained applications may be impaired when a con- siderable amount of CPU time is wasted. Finally, device virtualization has been the biggest Considering the use cases defined for the project, part of the OVERSEE project concerning resource among which is video playback, a technique to al- virtualization. Device virtualization is considered low dynamic scheduling has been successfully intro- as a state of the art problem. Solutions can be duced, which was presented on [10]. With this new found in the scope of Intel processors for main- service, it is possible to define on the cyclic plan frames [11], but no standard solutions for embed- specific time windows where the dynamic schedul- ded systems are available. Therefore, the imple- ing of partitions is allowed. The goal has been to mented device virtualization engine is a completely provide a way to improve CPU utilization by dy- novel system which relies on the concept of I/O namically sheduling partitions. server. The implemented dynamic scheduling facility re- Device management is a very extense subject it- lies on a scheduling technique known as Application self and, specifically, in Intel systems. On this pro- Defined Scheduling. Basically, the hypervisor does cessor, there is an I/O address space which can be not know anything about the scheduling policies, accessed by special instructions. Chunks of this its only task is to perform the context switches. space can be individually assigned to partitions so The decision about which partition is scheduled partitioning can be applied here. However, the I/O next is left to a trusted partition with special per- address space is only one of several ways of driv- 2 ing devices in Intel. The ISA bus, the standard binds the data transfers between I/O server and VGA raster or the PCI address spaces are accessed I/O clients to memory copies. This decreases sig- via memory mapped regions that have to be con- nificantly the device performance and increases the trolled in a di↵erent way. Among other reasons, burden of the CPU. E↵orts have been made to op- the PCI devices have access to DMA engines that timize the performance of the memory copies by bypass the MMU and can break spatial isolation. using the SSE2 Intel extensions and minimize the The developed device virtualization facility is used impact of the data transfers. to overcome the problem of memory mapped devices. The current architectures under study for device 5 Conclusions virtualization make some assumptions that do not hold to a virtualized system based on XtratuM. This paper presents the main results regarding vir- Specifically, they assume that there is an I/O server tualization issues on the OVERSEE project. This which has full access to the guest partition memory project has been a success regarding the virtualiza- address space or that the system has an available tion infrastructure provided, capable of being used IOMMU. Among these solutions can be found Vir- on commercial systems. Current e↵orts are tar- tio. Virtio [8] is the first e↵or to build a standard in- geted to include additional policies for the dynamic terface for device virtualization so it has been taken scheduler and for the design and implementation of as a starting point. a new version of the device virtualization engine ca- The first implementation e↵orts for the device pable of running as a standalone application. virtualization were published in [9]. This was the first attempt to implement an I/O server and provide a set of virtualized devices to Linux parti- References tions. However, this architecture has been re- designed from scratch, in order to have a device [1] XtratuM: Baseline Software Specification, virtualization engine capable of o↵ering devices to http://www.xtratum.org. any kind of partition, whether Linux based or not. [2] OVERSEE Project: Open Vehicular Se- cure Platform. FP7-ICT-2009-4. Project Id: 248333, 2010-12.

Load more