Hardware-assisted interrupt delivery optimization for virtualized embedded platforms

Virtualization is already a reality in modern embedded systems. Besides the direct relationship with cost reduction and improved resource utilization, virtualization enables the integration of real-time and general-purpose operating systems and applications on the same hardware platform. The resulting system may inherit deterministic timing characteristics for real-time along with a large software code base for general-purpose operating systems. However, the hypervisor must be carefully designed to take advantage of both types of operating systems. In this paper, we propose an interrupt policy for an embedded hypervisor using hardware-assisted virtualization. Our technique is flexible and can be adopted by applications with different timing constraints. Experimental results show that the interrupt delivery jitter on virtualized systems is close to non-virtualized when the proposed approach is used.