Title: Improving real-time of Jailhouse on embedded systems via bank and cache partitioning

Authors: Hubin Yang; Liu Yang; Fengyun Li; Yucong Chen; Rui Zhou; Qingguo Zhou

Addresses: Distributed and Embedded System Lab, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, Gansu, China ' Distributed and Embedded System Lab, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, Gansu, China ' Distributed and Embedded System Lab, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, Gansu, China ' Distributed and Embedded System Lab, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, Gansu, China ' Distributed and Embedded System Lab, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, Gansu, China ' Distributed and Embedded System Lab, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, Gansu, China

Abstract: As multi-core architectures become increasingly prevalent in embedded systems, the use of lightweight hypervisor to integrate multiple tasks on a single hardware platform has become increasingly popular. Although this approach can significantly reduce costs while improving system performance, it can cause hardware shared resource contention issues. We propose a virtualisation-based mechanism which mitigates shared memory and cache competition among virtual machines through the implementation of DRAM bank and cache partitioning techniques. The results demonstrate that applying our approach led to an average and maximum latency reduction of 74.49% and 73.59%, respectively, when compared to Jailhouse without partitioning using Cyclictest. Therefore, it is evident that our proposed mechanism effectively improves Jailhouse's real-time performance on multi-core embedded systems.

Keywords: DRAM bank partitioning; cache partitioning; real-time; Jailhouse hypervisor; isolation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJES.2023.136385

International Journal of Embedded Systems, 2023 Vol.16 No.2, pp.126 - 133

Received: 04 May 2023
Accepted: 22 Jun 2023
Published online: 31 Jan 2024 *

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