Paper Info
Title
BlueIO: A Scalable Real-Time Hardware I/O Virtualization System for Many-core Embedded Systems
Abstract
In safety-critical systems, time predictability is vital. This extends to I/O operations that require predictability, timing-accuracy, parallel access, scalability, and isolation. Currently, existing approaches cannot achieve all these requirements at the same time. In this article, we propose a framework of hardware framework for real-time I/O virtualization—termed BlueIO—to meet all these requirements simultaneously. BlueIO integrates the functionalities of I/O virtualization, low-layer I/O drivers, and a clock cycle level timing-accurate I/O controller (using the GPIOCP [36]). BlueIO provides this functionality in the hardware layer, supporting abstract virtualized access to I/O from the software domain. The hardware implementation includes I/O virtualization and I/O drivers, provides isolation and parallel (concurrent) access to I/O operations, and improves I/O performance. Furthermore, the approach includes the previously proposed GPIOCP to guarantee that I/O operations will occur at a specific clock cycle (i.e., be timing-accurate and predictable). In this article, we present a hardware consumption analysis of BlueIO to show that it linearly scales with the number of CPUs and I/O devices, which is evidenced by our implementation in VLSI and FPGA. We also describe the design and implementation of BlueIO and demonstrate how a BlueIO-based system can be exploited to meet real-time requirements with significant improvements in I/O performance and a low running cost on different OSs.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1145/3309765
ACM Transactions in Embedded Computing Systems
Keywords
Field
DocType
Safety-critical system, predictability, real-time system, scalability, timing-accuracy, virtualization
Virtualization,Computer science,Field-programmable gate array,Real-time operating system,Software,I/O virtualization,Cycles per instruction,Computer hardware,Very-large-scale integration,Scalability,Embedded system
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
18
3
1539-9087
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
4
0.69
0
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zhe Jiang1269.94
N. C. Audsley229529.55
Pan Dong392.49