XPDS14: Porting FreeRTOS to Xen on the ARM Cortex A15 - Jonathan Daugherty, Galois

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Autonomous vehicles need to run robust autopilot software in resource-constrained environments. Such vehicles are increasingly built on ARM platforms with resources to spare. We have begun investigating the feasibility of using this spare capacity to implement other interesting services on these vehicles by using Xen to separate the real-time autopilot software from a richer, non-real-time Linux system. In order to make this work, we have ported FreeRTOS, a popular minimal operating system for microcontrollers, to run as a Xen guest on the ARM Cortex A15.

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©  2014  Galois,  Inc.  All  rights  reserved.

Porting FreeRTOS to Xen on ARM

Jonathan Daugherty (jtd@galois.com)

Xen Developer Summit | August 19, 2014

©  2014  Galois,  Inc.  All  rights  reserved.

Agenda

§  Background §  Project status §  Approach §  Challenges §  Highlights §  Wishlist

©  2014  Galois,  Inc.  All  rights  reserved.

Parrot “AR.Drone” Quadcopter

©  2014  Galois,  Inc.  All  rights  reserved.

Inside the Parrot Drone

Linux FreeRTOS

©  2014  Galois,  Inc.  All  rights  reserved.

Consolidated System

Linux FreeRTOS

©  2014  Galois,  Inc.  All  rights  reserved.

Benefits of Consolidation

§  Simpler hardware design §  Lower SWAP: Space,

Weight, and Power §  More runtime flexibility

Linux FreeRTOS

©  2014  Galois,  Inc.  All  rights  reserved.

Our Use Case: SMACCMPilot

http://smaccmpilot.org/

High-levelimplementation

Generated FreeRTOS

implementation

©  2014  Galois,  Inc.  All  rights  reserved.

Agenda

§  Background §  Project status §  Approach §  Challenges §  Highlights §  Wishlist

©  2014  Galois,  Inc.  All  rights  reserved.

What’s Done

§  Ported FreeRTOS 7.6.0 to Xen 4.4

§  Open source release soon! §  Used HaLVM’s C library, now

available at https://github.com/GaloisInc/minlibc

©  2014  Galois,  Inc.  All  rights  reserved.

What’s Left

§  Investigate just how “real time” FreeRTOS is on Xen •  Try with ARINC 653 scheduler

§  Test FreeRTOS with Xen 4.5 §  Explore adoption (FreeRTOS community?)

©  2014  Galois,  Inc.  All  rights  reserved.

Agenda

§  Background §  Project status §  Approach §  Challenges §  Highlights §  Wishlist

©  2014  Galois,  Inc.  All  rights  reserved.

Phase 1: Port FreeRTOS to virtual ARMv7-A

§  Developed ARM kernel in a Xen domain §  Ignored PV support for this phase §  Used HYPERVISOR_console_io for debugging

©  2014  Galois,  Inc.  All  rights  reserved.

Phase 2: Add PV Support

§  Used Mini-OS for ARM as a starting point •  Xenbus •  Event channels •  Grant tables •  Xen console

§  Mini-OS showed how to use hypercalls

©  2014  Galois,  Inc.  All  rights  reserved.

Agenda

§  Background §  Project status §  Approach §  Challenges §  Highlights §  Wishlist

©  2014  Galois,  Inc.  All  rights  reserved.

New guests reveal virtualization gaps

§  FreeRTOS wants: •  ARM interrupt priorities & priority masking •  ARM interrupt nesting

§  Linux doesn’t use these HW features §  Now Xen supports more ARM features

©  2014  Galois,  Inc.  All  rights  reserved.

Guest implementation docs are spread out

§  Required reading: public/xen.h, public/arch-arm.h!•  Supported hypercalls •  ABI requirements

§  Linux sources for guidance on which hypercalls apply on ARM

©  2014  Galois,  Inc.  All  rights  reserved.

(Spoiler alert) Mini-OS could benefit

from more testing

©  2014  Galois,  Inc.  All  rights  reserved.

XSA-95: malformed kernel binaries crashed ‘xl’

©  2014  Galois,  Inc.  All  rights  reserved.

Agenda

§  Background §  Project status §  Approach §  Challenges §  Highlights §  Wishlist

©  2014  Galois,  Inc.  All  rights  reserved.

Xen on ARM is a great development platform

©  2014  Galois,  Inc.  All  rights  reserved.

ARM port of Mini-OS by Karim Allah was a huge help

©  2014  Galois,  Inc.  All  rights  reserved.

Fantastic support from Xen+ARM developers!

Thanks to: Julien Grall, Stefano Stabellini, Ian Campbell

©  2014  Galois,  Inc.  All  rights  reserved.

Agenda

§  Background §  Project status §  Approach §  Challenges §  Highlights §  Wishlist

©  2014  Galois,  Inc.  All  rights  reserved.

blkback!

blkfront!

PV driver “bugfix negotiation”

©  2014  Galois,  Inc.  All  rights  reserved.

libXenGuest.a!

-  Hypercalls!

-  Xenbus!

-  Event chans!

-  Grant tables!

-  Console!

©  2014  Galois,  Inc.  All  rights  reserved.

Implementing Xen Guests

Port your favorite OS to Xen!

©  2014  Galois,  Inc.  All  rights  reserved.

Summary

§  FreeRTOS 7.6.0 running on Xen 4.4 on ARM §  Open source release on GitHub soon! §  Minimal C library at

https://github.com/GaloisInc §  Learn more about SMACCMPilot at

http://smaccmpilot.org/

Get in touch at jtd@galois.com!

©  2014  Galois,  Inc.  All  rights  reserved.

All trademarks, service marks, trade names, trade dress, product names and logos appearing in these slides are the property of their respective owners, including in some instances Galois, Inc. All rights are reserved.

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