• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.177-187
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• 2020

Virtualization with hypervisors is one of emerging topics in multicore processors for space. Hypervisors are software layers to make several independent virtualized environments on one processor. Since all hardware resources are virtualized and distributed only by hypervisors, overall performance of processors can be improved by fully utilizing the resources. However at the same time, there are overheads for virtualizing and distributing hardware resources. Satellites are one of hard real time systems, and performance degradation with overheads should be analyzed thoroughly. Previous research on the overheads focused on single core systems. Even the overheads were analyzed in multicore systems, SMP environment was not fully included. This paper builds SMP environment with XtratuM, one of hypervisors for space missions, and analyzes performance degradation with overheads. Two boards of GR712RC with 2 LEON3FT CPUs and GR740 with 4 LEON4 CPUs are used in experiments. On each board, SMP benchmark functions are executed on SMP environment with XtratuM and on that without XtratuM respectively. Results are analyzed to find timing characteristics including overheads. Finally, applicability of the XtratuM to flight software in SMP is also reviewed.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.48 no.6
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• pp.467-478
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• 2020

Hypervisor virtualize hardware resources to utilize them more effectively. At the same time, hypervisor's characteristics of time and space partitioning improves reliability of flight software by reducing a complexity of the flight software. Korea Aerospace Research Institute chooses one of hypervisors for space, XtratuM, and examine its applicability to the flight software. XtratuM has strong points in performance improvement with high reliability. However, it does not support SMP. Therefore, it has limitation in using it with high performance applications including satellite altitude orbit control systems. This paper proposes RTEMS XM-SMP to support SMP with RTEMS, one of real time operating systems for space. Several components are added as hypercalls, and initialization processes are modified to use several processors with inter processors communication routines. In addition, all components related to processors are updated including context switch and interrupts. The effectiveness of the developed RTEMS XM-SMP is demonstrated with a GR740 board by executing SMP benchmark functions. Performance improvements are reviewed to check the effectiveness of SMP operations.