Porting of a Static Partitioning Hypervisor to Arm’s Cortex-R52 - José Martins & Sandro Pinto
Channel: The Linux Foundation
Date: 2023-07-12

Porting of a Static Partitioning Hypervisor to Arm’s Cortex-R52 - José Martins & Sandro Pinto, University of Minho

E/E architectures are evolving toward centralizing computing resources. As functions are consolidated into zonal controllers, automotive manufacturers rely on virtualization technology to provide the freedom from interference required for workloads with different safety integrity levels. Under this light, Arm unveiled Cortex-R52, the first processor to implement the MPU-based Armv8-R architecture endowed with virtualization support and specifically designed for real-time systems, which is already finding its way to several platforms on the market. The speakers will share their experience porting the Bao static partitioning hypervisor to Cortex-R52 platforms. Bao is an emerging player in the open-source hypervisor space, being specifically designed for mixed-criticality systems. This talk will first describe Armv8-R, focusing on its virtualization support, and contrast it with Armv8-A. While doing so, it will highlight the main challenges of porting Bao to this new architecture. Then, it will describe MPU-based virtualization use cases and how these are configured and set up. Finally, it will conclude with the still open issues facing such systems and a small live demo of Bao running multiple virtual machines on a Cortex-R52 platform.