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Abstract
Currently most virtualization systems are not adequate to support real-time systems. In this paper, we propose a virtual machine monitor which can schedule virtual machines that are employed with realtime environments. We show that the proposed virtual machine monitor can support virtual machines with real-time constraints efficiently.
Key Words: Virtualization, Virtual Machine Monitor, Scheduling, Real-Time System
1.Introduction
Over the past decade virtualization has been widely used in various situations. Currently virtualization is usually adopted in time-sharing systems and security applications. Other applications of virtualization include emulating hardware under development. Moreover, existing implementations of virtualization may be called non-real-time in the sense that a virtual machine operates without any requirement that specific computation is accomplished by a well-defined deadline.
However, emerging applications, such as multimedia applications, usually include real-time subsystems. These subsystems include software components that employ such real-time deadlines. These deadlines, typically, would need to be met for such applications to function successfully. Therefore, a need for virtualization that may be employed for use with such technologies may exist.
In this paper, we propose a virtual machine monitor which can efficiently schedule virtual machines with real-time requirements. The proposed virtual machine monitor adopts interrupt period detector to determine interrupt period of H/W devices. It also includes idle detector to identify resource requirements of virtual machines. By utilizing interrupt periods and resource requirements, the virtual machine monitor can schedule real-time virtual machines efficiently.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In the next section, we describe the overall architecture of the proposed virtual machine monitor. In the following section, results of performance evaluation is presented. In the final section, we summarize our conclusions.
2.The Proposed Scheme
As described above, current virtualization architecture is improper to support real-time systems. However, as processing capability of computing systems and use of real-time applications increase, techniques for employing virtual machines for use with real-time applications become more desirable.
One possible solution of virtualization for real-time system comprises an interface which couples guest OS and its applications to virtual machine monitor (fig. 1). This interface further comprises a resource management application. Guest OS, user application or resource management application send one or more scheduling parameters that may be used by a scheduler to schedule virtual machines such...