Design and Analysis of Multiple OS Implementation on a Single ARM-Based Embedded Platform

Abstract

Recently, with the development of embedded system hardware technology, there is a need to support various kinds of operating system (OS) operation in embedded systems. In mobile processors, ARM started to provide the virtualization extension support technology which was intended for processors in PC processors. Virtualization technology has the advantage of using hardware resources effectively. If the real-time operating system (RTOS) is operated on a hypervisor, there is a problem that RTOS performance is degraded due to overhead. Thus, we need to compare the performance between a single execution of the RTOS and simultaneous execution of multiple OS (RTOS + Linux). Therefore, in this paper, we measure the performance when the RTOS operates independently on the NVidia Jetson TK-1 embedded board supporting virtualization technology. Then, we measure the performance when the RTOS and Linux are operating simultaneously on top of a hypervisor. For this purpose, we implemented and ported such a RTOS, especially FreeRTOS and uC/OS, onto two embedded boards, such as the Arndale board (SAMSUNG, Seoul, South Korea) and the NVidia TK1 board (NVIDIA, Santa Clara, CA, USA).