Research on virtualisation technlogy for real-time reconfigurable systems

Overview & Synopsis

This thesis describes an original micro-kernel that manages virtualization and that provides an environment for real-time virtual machines. We have simplified the micro-kernel architecture by only keeping critical features required for virtualization, and massively reduced the kernel design complexity. Based on this micro-kernel, we have introduced a framework capable of DPR resource management in a virtual machine system. DPR accelerators are mapped as ordinary devices in each VM. Through dedicated memory management, our framework automatically detects the request for DPR resources and allocates them dynamically. According to various experiments and evaluations on the Zynq-7000 platform we have shown that Ker-ONE causes very low virtualization overheads, which can generally be ignored in real applications. We have also studied the real-time schedulability in virtual machines. The results show that RTOS tasks are guaranteed to be scheduled while meeting their intra-VM timing constraints. We have also demonstrated that the proposed framework is capable of virtual machine DPR allocation with low overhead.