CoMik : a predictable and cycle-accurately composable real-time microkernel

The functionality of embedded systems is ever increasing. This has lead to mixed time-criticality systems, where applications with a variety of real-time requirements co-exist on the same platform and share resources. Due to inter-application interference, verifying the real-time requirements of such systems is generally non trivial. In this paper, we present the CoMik microkernel that provides temporally predictable and composable processor virtualisation. CoMik's virtual processors are cycle-accurately composable, i.e. their timing cannot affect the timing of co-existing virtual processors by even a single cycle. Real-time applications executing on dedicated virtual processors can therefore be verified and executed in isolation, simplifying the verification of mixed time-criticality systems. We demonstrate these properties through experimentation on an FPGA prototyped hardware platform.