Re: Xen for real-time/embedded/automotive

[Dario Faggioli <dario.faggioli@citrix.com>]

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On mar, 2013-11-19 at 01:27 +0000, Simon Martin wrote:
> From my limited development here I would say the following:
>  
> 1.- The embedded systems I work on have just a flat memory space, no
> MMU or anything like that, so the Mini-OS example is total overkill.
> I am writing a real minimalist PV guest based on that but it's amazing
> how time consuming it's being. I'll be returning this to the project
> when I'm happy with it, as long as you want it.
>
I totally see what you mean! I'm glad that you find, also thanks to this
thread, some nice similarities with MirageOS, and some chance for
possible collaborations that were even beyond the original purpose of
this very thread... That's why Open Source is so awesome, isn't it?

> 2.- As far as I am concerned there are 2 metrics that I will be
> analysing once I have my little PV guest running: latency and jitter.
> As far as I am concerned, jitter can be worst that latency. In some
> systems you can compensate for latency, however jitter is much more
> difficult to handle.
>
These indeed are very important aspects of a truly real-time enabling
platform. As I said in the e-mail starting this, I'm committed to start
monitoring these, to at least assess where we stand.

I'll keep this thread informed about that, of course.

For now, for the benefits of all the people in this thread, let me use
his mail to direct you to the code of the "minimalistic" PV guest port
that Simon is working on, and that he kindly published here:

 "A Xen Micro Paravirtualized Guest to load a small independent OS"
  https://github.com/FurryFuttock/micro-pv

Thanks a lot Simon for doing and releasing this, I'm _sure_ it'll be
helpful for others, and for the prosecution of this discussion/activity.

BTW, I do realise only know that I probably never asked that... What is
(if you feel like saying it here) your specific usecase / final goal of
this work?

> 3.- At the moment I am assuming that I will access a PCI NIC directly
> from the PV guest. Would be nice to have a deterministic network
> access via Dom0 drivers so I can carry on playing in virtual land.
> This can be generalised to other hardware too.
>
That's another interesting piece of work Sisu was also referring too
(saying that they're doing some research on it, which is always fine).

Like it usually happens, we don't risk to get in short of things to do
that soon, do we? :-P

Thanks and Regards,
Dario

-- 
<<This happens because I choose it to happen!>> (Raistlin Majere)
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Dario Faggioli, Ph.D, http://about.me/dario.faggioli
Senior Software Engineer, Citrix Systems R&D Ltd., Cambridge (UK)


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