Real Time Linux Workshops
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Ninth Real-Time Linux Workshop on November 2 to 4, 2007, in Linz, Austria
XtratuM for PowerPC
Zhou Rui, Wang Baojun, Arthur Siro, Nicholas McGuire, Zhou Qingguo
Xtratum is a nanokernel designed for providing domain support to execute concurrently several operating systems on a single computer. These domains are in the same hardware but running temporally and spatially isolated. As a very thin virtualization layer virtualizing the essential resources (interrupt, timer, memory, and CPU), XtratuM is suitable for embedded real-time systems, and at least one of those domains should provide real-time capabilities, which can be implemented by porting RTOSes onto XtratuM. The latest released XtratuM 1.0 supporting Linux kernel 2.6.17.4 is implemented on x86 architecture. In this paper, we mainly focus on our work of porting XtratuM to PowerPC. We started XtratuM for PowerPC since March 2006 and published some project fundamentals at the 8th Real-Time Linux Workshop in October 2006. For this time, we will present our implementation of XtratuM for PowerPC, especially the key components including virtual timer, virtual interrupt and virtual memory management for multi-domain support based on PowerPC. PowerPC has a wide range of family members from low-end 32bit like 4xx series up to high-end multi-threaded 64bit like CELL, which can satisfy different powerful and stable performance requirements of various types of embedded and real-time operating systems. XtratuM for PowerPC will help to expand the applicable area of this free-software nanokernel, and also promote embedded and real-time applicable abilities based on PowerPC.