The study of the virtual machine for space real-time embedded systems

In this paper, we report on our work-in-progress with design and developing of a virtual machine which is one of components in the flight software running on the spacecraft real-time embedded systems. The virtual machines have been widely developed and adopted for the flight software because of advantage of the reusability of the flight software and the portability of the virtual machine. However, most of virtual machines in flight software has not supported the real-time property. Also, the interpreter has slow translation speed compared to compilation-based methods. These cause the limitation of applications running on virtual machine. We introduce the virtual machine design which is supporting the real time property and improving the performance of the interpreter execution.