Benchmarking Analysis and Characterization of Hypervisors for Space Multicore Systems

Multicore systems are becoming widely diffused in the space domain, mainly because of the opportunities to improve performance and, at the same time, to optimize orthogonal metrics (e.g., cost, power consumption). However, the need to consider safety integrity levels, dictated by the relevant standards (i.e., ECSS-Q-ST-80C, ECSSQ-ST-30, ECSSQ-ST-40C, NPD 8700.1E, NPR 8715.3D, JMR-001, OST 134-1021-99), into space applications adds further challenges. In fact, in a multicore system, multiple processing cores share various resources; therefore, the implementation of modern and complex integrated modular avionics systems is problematic. Actually, integrated modular avionics systems are inherently mixed-critical ones where spatial and temporal isolation in the shared resources access is essential. As a way to mitigate such a problem, the exploitation of virtualization technologies allows to guarantee isolation and certification requirements but, at the same time, introduces scheduling overhead and new issues. The selection of the best virtualization technology is just one part of the solution. Then, further benchmarking and validation activities should help developers to certify virtualized environments running on multicore architectures. In such a context, this work proposes a methodology for characterization of hypervisor technologies in the space domain. Experimental results obtained by applying the proposed methodology in order to characterize some reference hypervisors features close the paper.