Salva Peiró, Instituto de Automática e Informatica Industrial
Tomás Tormo, Instituto de Automática e Informatica Industrial
Miguel Masmano, Instituto de Automática e Informatica Industrial
Patricia Balbastre, Instituto de Automática e Informatica Industrial
Alfons Crespo, Instituto de Automática e Informatica Industrial

Partitioned systems are recognised as an adequate solution to fulfill the security and safety requirements demanded by the avionics and aerospace sectors. The main idea behind partitioned systems is virtualization. A virtual machine (VM) is a software implementation of a computer that executes programs like a real machine. A hypervisor is a layer of software that enables the independent execution of several virtual machines or partitions.

Depending on the virtualization needs, there exist several types of hypervisors targeting specific application needs ranging from general purpose virtualization to embedded systems virtualization, one of them is the XtratuM hypervisor. XtratuM is an open source hypervisor specially designed for real-time embedded systems. It provides a framework to run several operating systems (or real-time executives) in a robust partitioned environment ensuring strong temporal and spatial isolation properties.

In this paper we present the PaRTiKle real-time OS running on the XtratuM hypervisor (x86). PaRTiKle is a POSIX real-time operating system targeted at embedded systems that conform to the PSE51 Minimal Real-Time System profile. The paper discusses in detail PaRTiKle RTOS internals, the modifications performed to virtualize the system on top of the XtratuM hypervisor, the methodologies and experiences during the evaluation of the system conformance with the PSE51 profile and future work.