Performance isolation for real-time systems with Xen hypervisor on multi-cores

Virtualization techniques are gaining significant interests in embedded real-time system design. However, existing virtualization platforms lack strong performance isolation among virtual machines. In this work we propose a method to monitor and control the shared memory accesses of individual virtual machines on multi-core processors with Xen hypervisor, to enhance the performance isolation among virtual machines and improve the timing predictability of real-time applications. Experiments with the SPEC2006 benchmark programs are conducted to validate the proposed method.