Real-Time Performance Analysis and Tuning of Embedded System Virtualization Architecture Based on KVM

Embedded systems are proceeding towards exploiting virtualization technology to have the benefits of real-time operating system (RTOS) and general-purpose operating system (GPOS) in the same system. This combination provides both a timely and deterministic behavior and a general-purpose application codebase. There still exist concerns about the real-time responsiveness of RTOS running inside a virtual machine (VM). In this paper, the real-time performance of kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) virtualization architecture is analyzed on a multi-core system. Here, a preemptible Linux kernel with the PREEMPT_RT patch is used for RTOS, while a standard Linux kernel is used for GPOS. The interrupt latency inside the real-time guest VM is analyzed by applying various amounts of CPU, memory, and I/O stresses on the guest and host systems. A VM resource monitoring tool 'VM_stat' is developed to know the resource usage of the guest VMs, which is useful for effectively tuning the system. Different real-time tuning measures are applied on the host/guest systems, and the performance is analyzed.