Towards an Analysable, Scalable, Energy-Efficient I/O Virtualization for Mixed-Criticality Systems

Zhe Jiang, Xiaotian Dai, Pan Dong, Ran Wei, Dawei Yang, Neil Audsley, Nan Guan

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

In Mixed-Criticality Systems (MCSs), timely handling of I/O operations is a key for the system being successfully implemented and appropriately functioned. The I/O system for a MCS must simultaneously enable different features, including isolation/separation, timing-predictability, performance, scalability and energy-efficiency. Moreover, such I/O system also requires to manage I/O resource in an adaptive manner to facilitate efficient yet safe resource sharing among components of different criticality levels. Existing approaches cannot achieve all of these requirements simultaneously. This paper presents a mixed-criticality I/O management framework, termed MCSIOV. MCS-IOV is based on hardware-assisted virtualisation, which provides temporal and spatial isolation and prohibits fault propagation with limited extra overhead. MCS-IOV extends a real-time I/O virtualisation system, by supporting the concept of mixed criticalities and customised interfaces for schedulers, which offers good timing-predictability and scalability. Finally, we introduce an energy management framework for MCS-IOV, ensuring the power-efficiency of the design. The MCS-IOV is the first systematical solution that fulfils all the requirements as a mixed-criticality I/O system.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)320-333
Number of pages14
JournalIEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
Volume41
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 16 Feb 2021

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
IEEE

Copyright:
Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

Keywords

  • analysability
  • Device drivers
  • energy-efficiency.
  • Hardware
  • Input/Output (I/O)
  • Program processors
  • Real-time systems
  • Resource management
  • scalability
  • Scalability
  • system architecture
  • Task analysis
  • Timing

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