BU Computer Systems Seminar

Speaker: Daniele Ottaviano, University Federico II of Naples & BU Cyber-Physical Systems Lab | The Omnivisor

Talk Title: “The Omnivisor: A real-time static partitioning hypervisor extension for heterogeneous core virtualization over MPSoCs”

Abstract: Following the needs of industrial applications, virtualization has been proven to be among the best approaches for the realization of mixed-criticality systems due to the capability of lowering the deployment's space, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C). The spread of cutting-edge hardware protection mechanisms for embedded architectures like Multi-Processor Systems on Chip (MPSoCs) opens the door to the development of powerful and highly dependable hypervisors that help developers deal with the complexity of modern technologies while maintaining real-time requirements for critical applications. However, the virtualization support for heterogeneous core clusters over MPSoCs is still overlooked. Modern hypervisors are designed to operate exclusively on main cores, with little or no consideration given to other coprocessors within the system, such as real-time processing units (RPUs) or soft cores deployed on reprogrammable hardware (FPGA). Typically, these coprocessors are regarded as I/O devices allocated to virtual machines that run on primary cores, endowed with full control and responsibility over them. We introduce the Omnivisor, an innovative real-time static partitioning hypervisor model explicitly designed for efficiently managing virtual machines across heterogeneous processing cores within MPSoCs. The Omnivisor addresses the gap by demonstrating that virtual machines can seamlessly operate on cores with different Instruction Set Architectures (ISAs) within the same MPSoC. Moreover, the Omnivisor ensures temporal and spatial isolation between virtual machines by utilizing diverse hardware and software protection mechanisms. The presented approach not only expands the scope of virtualization in MPSoCs, but also enhances the overall system reliability and performance in mixed-criticality applications.