Master Thesis - Past Projects - Abstract

A System for Dynamic Device Control between Linux and OSE

ID: LITH-IDA-EX--07/031--SE

Advancements in hand-held embedded systems have made the software running on them increasingly complex. Many of the applications demand the functions of a powerful operating system to provide the expected standardised services. One way of solving this is for the developers of embedded software to create virtualisations that, for example, allow Linux to run on top of real-time kernels such as OSE. This thesis builds on such a virtualisation developed at Enea AB. The existing version of the virtualisation lacks the infrastructure to control ownership of I/O devices during runtime. This thesis studies whether it is feasible to design and implement a device manager for the virtualisation. This is needed to be able to remove control of a device from Linux so that potential failures of Linux code do not affect the underlying functions running on OSE. The thesis begins by presenting what virtualisation means and how sharing of devices might be done. Next it proposes a design for a sub-system to solve the problem. The thesis also contains an example implementation of that system for the keypad device as a proof of concept. This implementation has been evaluated and initial results show that it is both possible to keep Linux alive without control over I/O devices, and that the proposed design seems to fulfil the desired properties.

Keywords: Real-time, Virtualisation, Device drivers, embedded systems, hardware, OSE, Linux

Author(s): Erik Nordström

Contact: Simin Nadjm-Tehrani