Using Hypervisor Technology for Safe and Secure Deployment of High-Performance Multicore Platforms in Future Vehicles

Future in-car applications such as autonomous driving call for the use of multicore system-on-chips (SoCs) together with powerful hardware accelerators. Hypervisor technologies offer the opportunity to partition such platforms and efficiently orchestrate the use of the shared hardware accelerators. Moreover, this allows one to consolidate existing and brand new applications in a single platform and thereby preserve past investments. On the other hand, the use of hypervisor-technology also addresses the need for shielding mission-critical software from uncritical software applications co-located on the same platform. Integrating applications with different safety and security needs into a single platform raises manifold design questions. We, at Elektrobit, believe, that a microkernel-based Hypervisor solution can be a mean to establish spatial and temporal isolation of software stacks and therefore is vital for deploying high-performance SoCs, not only inside vehicles, but also in other domains where software systems have to be shielded from another. As part of Elektrobits contribution to the EPI project, a hypervisor demonstration stack with different virtual machines will be deployed on a performance-centric multicore platform. In this paper, we present our system layout and discuss its key design features.