A Hypervisor for MIPS-Based Architecture Processors - A Case Study in Loongson Processors

Loongson is a family of general purpose processors based on MIPS architecture designed and manufactured in Mainland China. With the maturity of Loongson CPUs, applications are widely available with the increasing development of software tools and hardware platforms by research teams in academia and industry. In recent years, products based on Loongson have been mainly used in education, personal computers and server systems. Meanwhile, it is not yet popularly used in industrial real-time control fields, so such products have large room and potential to further development and deployment. The M-Hyper visor discussed in this paper is a real-time hyper visor designed for MIPS architecture and implemented in Loongson2F processor. It is based on the management program of para-virtualization whilst multiple partitions are scheduled to execute according to their priorities. The design and implementation of M-Hyper visor is discussed, along with details as timer, interrupts, memory management, partition loading and scheduling, to enrich real-time virtualized applications for MIPS architecture. Evaluation results show the performance and viability of proposed design, being promising to new deployments.