Integrated Scheduling for a Reliable Dual-OS Monitor

Virtualization solutions aimed at the consolidation of a real-time operating system (RTOS) and a general-purpose operating system (GPOS) onto the same platform are gaining momentum as high-end embedded systems increase their computation power. Among them, the most extended approach for scheduling both operating systems consists of executing the GPOS only when the RTOS becomes idle. Although this approach can guarantee the real-time performance of the RTOS tasks and interrupt handlers, the responsiveness of GPOS time-sensitive activities is negatively affected when the RTOS contains compute-bound activities executing with low priority. In this paper, we modify a reliable hardware-assisted dual-OS virtualization technique to implement an integrated scheduling architecture where the execution priority level of the GPOS and RTOS activities can be mixed with high granularity. The evaluation results show that the proposed approach is suitable for enhancing the responsiveness of the GPOS time-sensitive activities without compromising the reliability and real-time performance of the RTOS.

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