Development of RTEMS SMP Platform Based on XtratuM Virtualization Environment for Satellite Flight Software

Hypervisor virtualize hardware resources to utilize them more effectively. At the same time, hypervisor's characteristics of time and space partitioning improves reliability of flight software by reducing a complexity of the flight software. Korea Aerospace Research Institute chooses one of hypervisors for space, XtratuM, and examine its applicability to the flight software. XtratuM has strong points in performance improvement with high reliability. However, it does not support SMP. Therefore, it has limitation in using it with high performance applications including satellite altitude orbit control systems. This paper proposes RTEMS XM-SMP to support SMP with RTEMS, one of real time operating systems for space. Several components are added as hypercalls, and initialization processes are modified to use several processors with inter processors communication routines. In addition, all components related to processors are updated including context switch and interrupts. The effectiveness of the developed RTEMS XM-SMP is demonstrated with a GR740 board by executing SMP benchmark functions. Performance improvements are reviewed to check the effectiveness of SMP operations.