VOSYSmonitor, a low latency Monitor layer for Mixed-Criticality Systems

VOSYSmonitor integrated into an Renesas R-Car H3 platform is demonstrated at Automotive Linux Summit, Tokyo 2016

This video demonstration showcases VOSYSmonitor, the Virtual Open Systems low latency monitor layer for the ARMv8-A architecture presented at the Tokyo's Automotive Linux Summit 2016 event. It demonstrates VOSYSmonitor capability to concurrently run a safety critical Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) along with a General-Purpose Operating System (GPOS), such as Linux with KVM virtualization. It is ported and executed on the Renesas R-Car H3 platform (Quad Cortex-A57 running at 1,5GHz, Quad Cortex-A53 at 1,2GHz). VOSYSmonitor isolates the safety critical RTOS from the GPOS virtualized systems by taking benefit of ARM Trustzone, while providing a safe and secure communication between the two secure and non secure worlds. Its functionalities and best in class performance are essential in various modern mixed-criticality systems, including automotive, industrial, drones, mobile, smart meters gateways and IoT.

In fact, a FreeRTOS is executing in the ARM secure world while Linux-KVM is running in the non-Secure world. In this demo, the following features, which request interaction between KVM virtual machines and freeRTOS, are implemented on the R-CAR H3 platform and are executed concurrently:

• Park assistant: A joystick controls a servo motor through a real time task, interacting with the rear view camera executing in the normal world.
• Heating, Ventilating, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) control: within Linux/KVM a web-server Virtual Machine (VM) runs an HVAC panel web application. By visiting the application from external devices (e.g., smartphone, tablet), the user can for instance controls the fan speed, etc. By acting on the web-server VM, the user can then forward commands to the secure world, through VOSYSmonitor (i.e., by usage of SMC service), in order to control the fan speed, which is done in the secure FreeRTOS side of the system.
• Secure OS heartbeat: A push button controls a real time task which intentionally crashes FreeRTOS execution. In this context, the VOSYSmonitor software layer product, which is monitoring the secure OS execution, reboots it.
• Open GL applications: GLmark2 application runs on the Linux host by using Open GL GPU acceleration.