Evaluation of the overheads and latencies of a virtualized RTOS

The virtualization technique has become a popular trend in the domain of real-time embedded systems. For example, in the automotive industry, practitioners are currently considering the idea of using such technique to run simultaneously the AUTOSAR real-time operating system (RTOS) for real-time programming, and the Linux-GENIVI operating system to support in-vehicle infotainment applications on the same Electronic Control Unit. However, running a real-time operating system inside a virtual machine instead of a bare metal hardware may have a significant cost in terms of latencies and overheads. This raises the question of the order-of-magnitude of a virtualized RTOS's overheads and latencies in comparison to a single RTOS running on a real machine. In this paper, an evaluation of a virtualized RTOS's latencies and overheads is proposed in order to observe how virtualization impacts these timing characteristics. Our experiments demonstrate that the overheads and latencies of a virtualized RTOS compete with those obtained in the same RTOS running on bare-metal hardware.