RFC - Time & space partitioning with RTEMS

[Pavel Pisa]

Hello All,

I think, that combination of RTEMS as RT and safety control partition OS
and Linux as a generic OS would be extremely interesting for many
applications. The ability to run multiple safely separated instances
of RTEMS could be interesting as well.

The option to use RTEMS as hypervisor and as guest OS seems
interesting to me, but it would require much work and from safety
and certification point of view it could be disadvantage.

May it be, that Xtratum nanokernel developed by group around University
of Valencia and OpenTech (Nicholas Mc Guire) could be reasonable
choice. It is fully open-source with public development. It has been
started as a replacement of RTLinux GPL solution to overcome its
deficiencies - mainly unmaintenable namespace collision with 2.6 kernels
and FSM Labs threats of patent dispute (for IRQ redirections, which has
been three from DOS days anyway). The Xtratum mainline is available for
i386 now, but there exists port to PowerPC architecture at least now
and other ports would be much welcome, but require more people
to contribute.

There are aims to evaluate possibilities to use Xtratum as base hypervisor
for applications requiring IEC 61508 safety certifications. There is
Europen project proposal in preparation for building consortium
of universities and companies to prove and extend this concept.
The consortium is looking for one or two more companies willing
to participate in this project still. Sven, you may know that already
from different channels.

The Xtratum can already run Linux 2.6 and PaRTiKle (RTLinux replacement)
in parallel. The adaptation of RTEMS to be yet another possible guest OS
would be great. I personally like RTEMS API and well defined layered
design much and I believe, that RTEMS in parallel with Linux could be
interesting choice and if it could fall into scope of project and our
university could get funding for such work, I would convice my colleagues
and bosses to focus on such work. I hope, that I could contribute
by some advises and code as time and my knowledge allows.

More informations about Xtratum can be found there

http://www.xtratum.org/

Best wishes

                Pavel Pisa
        e-mail: pisa at cmp.felk.cvut.cz
        www:    http://cmp.felk.cvut.cz/~pisa


On Tuesday 29 April 2008 09:22, Metge Jean-Jacques wrote:
> Hi Sven,
>
> To be frank, I initially had also the feeling that it would be better to
> port an existing light hypervisor (open source or not) on a LEON, than
> trying to adapt the LEON version of RTEMS to this kind of feature. In this
> case, and to go into your direction, RTEMS would have been an OS
> "personality" that could run over this hypervisor, and any other OS
> "personality" than RTEMS could also be acceptable on top of this hypervisor
> (providing some adaptations). The problem is that it really seems
> impossible, today, to find this kind of product either in open source or in
> commercial domains, and that I do not have sufficient time & budget to
> develop (or make develop) an hypervisor from scratch for the LEON or to
> finance a port on a LEON of an existing commercial hypervisor for embedded
> RT applications (example : TRANGO, kernel layer of PikeOS, module OS of the
> VxWorks653 product, LynxSecure, ...) . That's why I came back to RTEMS,
> because :
> 1- it already exists for the LEON
> 2- taking into account its open source characteristics, I thought it would
> be maybe easier to reach a honorable result, a providing reasonnable effort
>
> However, I am quite ready to change again my view, if many of us feel the
> same needs around an hypervisor for the LEON and are ready share the same
> interest around a new type of open source product... I am quite open to any
> constuctive proposal in this direction.
>
> Regards
>
> Jean-Jacques
>