XtratuM/PPC: a hypervisor for partitioned system on PowerPC processors

High-performance processors give opportunities and challenges for development of real-time and embedded applications. New advances in hardware introduce new questions as alternatives to enable multiple applications to share a single processor and memory, so that the high-performance hardware that contains millions of transistors can be fully utilized, as also the way to keep system dependable and stable by making applications stay in spatial and temporal isolation inside same system. It is introduced in this paper XtratuM, a real-time hypervisor designed and implemented based on the concept of a partitioned system, by enabling partitions to execute simultaneously in spatial and temporal isolation without interfering with each other, but sharing the same hardware. Still in this paper, we provide a brief introduction on partitioned systems and its significance, also presenting the prototype implementation of XtratuM on PowerPC architecture including essential parts: hypercalls, timer, interrupt, and memory management implementations. Benchmark applications have been carried out to illustrate that the model implemented by XtratuM is suitable to offer the capability of spatial and temporal isolation under real-time requirements.